“... for this was Protestant-ruled Northern Ireland in the 1950s, a place not altogether unlike the white-ruled South Africa evoked in the frank confessional of David Schalkwyk’s opening chapter. In the apartheid world, the young Schalkwyk ‘was defined legally, socially and … psychologically as a “master”’, even as the material realities of bondage ...”

“... consisted in desultory exercises in Christ Church Meadows, and lectures on map-reading given by Edmund Blunden. I worked hard at Oxford, but what I wanted from it was to meet extraordinary, over-life size characters. In the hothouse atmosphere, generated by the imminence of war, I was not to be disappointed, and the fact that this would all disappear, and ...”

“... involved. The marriage lasted 82 days before Louis succumbed, possibly to overexcitement. Wearing white for mourning, Mary Rose was sequestered until it could be known if she was carrying a child. She was not, but during this period ‘la reine blanche’ felt vulnerable: the new king, Francis, would penetrate her seclusion and make insinuations. She thought ...”

“... Beaux Arts’, which describes Bruegel’s Icarus, in which ‘the sun shone/As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green/Water’. This slight pause or swoop tells of a captivation that exists before, and possibly after, any considered judgment about the thing ostensibly being described: a boy is falling out of the sky and into the sea, but ...”

“... lists human fat among the ingredients of his wonder-working oglio del Scoto; in Webster’s White Devil, Isabella dreams of preserving the flesh of her rival, Vittoria, ‘like mummia’, while in The Duchess of Malfi, Bosola imagines the body of the woman he has come to kill as no better than ‘a salvatory’ (or ointment box) filled with ‘green ...”

“... to borrow two dollars for a taxi fare. ‘All of this,’ he noted, ‘happened in front of Edmund Wilson and his wife, Virgil [Thomson], Mrs Otto Kahn and poor Lady Ribblesdale.’ What happened to Capote, as he began to visualise In Cold Blood in Kansas in 1959 and 1960, is immensely complex. The story of how he manipulated his sources is a godsend ...”

“... Edition was supposed to represent its essence. As late as 13 June 1910 he could still write, to Edmund Gosse, that ‘black depression – the blackness of darkness & the cruellest melancholia – are my chronic enemy and curse.’ And just as he began to feel some stirrings of improvement, he suffered a second crushing loss with the death – in August ...”

“... What is this? ‘Two miles behind it a jet of white steam was travelling from the left to the right of the picture.’ It is a train, viewed across a valley, in Jude the Obscure (1895), and it is the only sentence offered there about this train. Flaubert is always described as the great cinematic novelist, the great novelist of detail, and indeed Flaubert has his own described train-steam too – similarly seen, in L’Education sentimentale, across fields, but ‘stretched out in a horizontal line, like a gigantic ostrich feather whose tip kept blowing away ...”

“... Kong she met Alexis Vedeniapine, a British army officer. Olubas tells us that Vedeniapine was ‘a White Russian, born in St Petersburg in 1916’ who had escaped the Russian Revolution with his family and was brought up in Shanghai before being sent to boarding school in, of all places, Woodford, Essex. From there he entered agricultural college, and worked ...”

“... a remarkably handsome newspaper, much more spacious in its page layouts and crisper in its black/white contrasts than its rival, the Sunday Times, which looked untidy and grey by comparison. Throughout the 1950s it was the dominant ‘quality’ Sunday paper, certainly in its cultural and political influence among the young if not always in terms of its ...”

“... know all about the situation – & perhaps a little more than all,’ he murmured side-of-mouth to Edmund Wilson late in 1957. ‘There is a (secret) Russian text in Oxford, in the keeping of the sisters of the poet: they guard it like Cerberi … I have (secretly) got a microfilm of the Russian text to the Widener Library for safe-keeping, but they are not ...”

“... the poems were lying about, & I did not quite know what to do with them,’ Thomas Hardy wrote to Edmund Gosse shortly after the publication of his first collection, Wessex Poems (1898). ‘It is difficult,’ he went on, ‘to let people who think I have made a fresh start know that to indulge in rhymes was my original weakness, & the prose only an ...”

“... And of songs: ‘David of the White Rock’, the ‘Summer Song’ so soft, and that Beautiful tune to which roguish words by Welsh pit boys Are sung – but never more beautiful than here under the ...”

“... dust-heap the remains of the Christmas pudding (‘idolatrous confectionery’) offered to young Edmund by the servants. The equivalent moment in The Recognitions hardly measures up: a guest invited for Wyatt’s fourth birthday brings a plus one, so under pressure from Aunt May (who has apparently baked an exact number of slices) Wyatt must sacrifice his ...”

“... grey stripes; a 25-cent belt stays in them always. A freshly laundered and brilliantly starched white shirt with narrow black stripes. A brown, green and gold tie in broad stripes, of stiff and hard imitation watered silk. The particulars neither solicit nor receive celebration, and the end is a return: ‘The crease is still sharp in the ...”