“... years ago. Driven by curiosity about my family and my affection for the poetry of William Butler Yeats – an internationally known poet – I saved up a hundred dollars beyond the cost of a one-way ticket and lit out, 20 and cocksure, for Ireland. Several of my generation were going off to Vietnam at the time but I’d drawn high numbers in the Nixon ...”

“... in Beloved, the mental ward in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the bus in Robert Olen Butler’s Mr Spaceman all function as metaphors for the creative writing workshop.) McGurl also provides a smart and useful typology of ‘programme’ fiction (defined as the prose work of MFA graduates and/or instructors), divided into three main ...”

“... to Greece. Tony mentions in the poem her absent friends: George Devine, Ron Eyre, Tony Richardson, John and John (Dexter and Osborne), and at the conclusion a cake is brought in and Jocelyn is crowned with laurels. It could be thought pretentious but since Jocelyn is so far from pretentious it seems both fitting and moving.I ...”

“... of my childhood. 10 February. Finish with some regret Frances Spalding’s book on the Pipers, John and Myfanwy, the latter figuring in The Habit of Art where she is to some extent disparaged. I’ve always been in two minds about Piper, liking him when I was young with his paintings ‘modern’ but representational enough to be acceptable, a view I ...”

“... millionaire’ and suggests I should buy the library myself. He also claims as did Eamonn Butler back in 1996 that there is nowadays no need for libraries, for which other uses should be found, describing them as ‘prime retail opportunities’, which says it all.30 May, Yorkshire. Asked to provide a foreword for a book of oral history put together ...”

“... years of Africa as I had months – almost After Casement’s arrest in 1916, Conrad wrote to John Quinn in New York: We never talked politics ... He was a good companion: but already in Africa I judged that he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don’t mean stupid. I mean that he was all emotion. By emotional force (Congo ...”

“... seemed to me,’ Henry James wrote to the critic and campaigner for homosexual rights John Addington Symonds in 1884, ‘that the victims of a common passion should sometimes exchange a look.’ The common passion James referred to was for Italy – or was it?Here is one double-take. In Mansfield Park, published in 1814, Mary Crawford is rattling ...”

“... and old-fashioned time indicators such as ‘presently’ (lifted, according to his friend John Spurling, from Richard Hughes). And he renders his characters’ inner voices oddly, sometimes putting thoughts in quotation marks, sometimes using free indirect style and sometimes forgetting which of the two he’s doing. From time to time this makes ...”

“... an artificial relationship of confidence between the parties. Within a few weeks, Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, the president of the Family Division, basing herself in part on our decision, granted worldwide injunctions to prevent the tabloid press from carrying out its threats to expose the identities and whereabouts of the two boys who had killed the ...”

“... cigars. Feminist art historians have often found her exasperating. As in the case of Elizabeth Butler, the pre-eminent battle painter of Victorian Britain, Bonheur’s subjects don’t easily lend themselves to gendered analysis. Linda Nochlin deplored Bonheur’s indecision in both asserting and shunning her femininity (Nochlin called it ‘frilly blouse ...”

“... Waugh heroically did to Mr Paul Moor. After Moor had been ushered over the threshold by Waugh’s butler (the date is 1949, when outside the pages of P.G. Wodehouse butlers were a virtually extinct species) he encountered the man he described as his ‘idol’. ‘After an elaborate reaction of exaggerated astonishment, there came, “But I thought you’d be ...”

“... other places – suggest affirmative answers. Two notable studies have appeared recently: Marilyn Butler’s Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, reviewed in the LRB (Vol. 3, No 21) by Christopher Ricks; and Thomas McFarland’s marvellously over-the-top Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, which also appeared in 1981. (One might commend, en passant, the ...”

“... conviction that publicity was the one climate in which to nurture goodness and truth. Josephine Butler, for example, believed that you would not need police forces if you had a free press. The general opinion was that secrecy inevitably gave rise to corruption – ‘every thing secret degenerates,’ Lord Acton wrote. It was a ‘foreign’ trait, and in ...”

“... declared: ‘Your Honour, like Oliver Goldsmith, Dean Swift, Edmund Burke, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge, Sean O’Casey, James Joyce, Brendan Behan and Samuel Beckett, I occasionally have difficulties with the English language.’ Peals of laughter around the ...”

“... not vested interests, which are dangerous for good and evil. The author of this passage was John Maynard Keynes. His words were not carelessly uttered but form the pregnant last paragraph of his magnum opus, The General Theory, published in 1936. This obviously expressed his hope that his own ideas would be disseminated through such a process and in ...”