“... transcendence of shame, the erotic correspondence in 1909 between James and Nora Joyce. Joyce, as Richard Ellmann puts it, ‘wishes to possess his wife’s soul, and have her possess him, in utter nakedness. To know someone else beyond love and hate, beyond vanity and remorse, beyond human possibility almost, is his extravagant desire.’ Picasso, in ...”

“... with that ‘poet, playwright, critic, editor and publisher’, T.S. Eliot (whose later life, Richard Ellmann informs us, ‘became rather stately’): ‘I did not know death had undone so many.’ When originally conceived, Lee observed that ‘national biography must be prepared to satisfy the commemorative instinct of all sections of the ...”

“... same height and weight as Byrne in order to maintain verisimilitude’.In his 1959 biography, Richard Ellmann reported that Joyce ‘often agreed with Vico that “imagination is nothing but the working over of what is remembered.”’ Ellmann also quotes Joyce’s remark to Frank Budgen: ‘Imagination is ...”

“... science. To an alarming degree, theory preempted argument. H.D. had been abandoned by her husband, Richard Aldington, for another woman, during a difficult pregnancy in which mother and child seemed doomed; her love affair with the feminist Bryher was fraught; writing set up its own strains: but Freud already knew, amid this welter of anxieties, what really ...”

“... of the medical establishment. He continued practising as a doctor and in 1867 produced what Richard Ellmann considered his most cheerful book, Lough Corrib. In 1873 the Royal Academy of Ireland conferred its highest honour on him. The Wildes, then, lived inside the established world and outside it. They had no difficulty with his knighthood, just ...”

“... they were, though briefly, lovers a reasonable inference made long ago by Virginia Moore, and by Richard Ellmann, though his publisher seems to think Foster the first to make it securely. In the long run it matters less than the occult union, and less than Yeats’s sympathy in her marital misfortunes. There is nobility in his commemoration of John ...”

“... strange. For although by way of Ireland, it comes actually from America in the person of one Richard Ellmann of the university of Harvard who, under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, has come to collect material to enable him to write on the intellectual development of Yeats. It is Hone who, despite my neglect of him, has sent ...”

“... came close to inventing a language that seemed to contain the mind’s endless restlessness.Lucy Ellmann’s new novel, Ducks, Newburyport, does not, despite the claims of some reviewers, consist of a single sentence (I counted 880). But it does contain one very long one: a comma-strewn stream that follows the thoughts of an Ohioan housewife during the first ...”

“... speculation’. Its style and approach, it’s true, bring Kitty Kelley to mind more often than Richard Ellmann: it is aimed squarely at an audience conceived as wanting its close readings of ‘Pike’ and ‘The Thought-Fox’ leavened by details of Hughes’s ‘vigorous’ love-making, and likely to be impressed by pseudo-profound sentences such as ...”

“... The heroine of Lucy Ellmann’s new novel is one of an increasingly rare breed in modern fiction – a virgin. Isabel is a thirty-something art history student, prim, gauche, improbably starry-eyed, impossibly self-obsessed, a junior version of the Anita Brookner wallflower (i.e. not yet prepared to consign herself to the sad margins of singlehood ...”

“... Adolf Hitler. This is the Joyce portrayed in Gilbert’s Paris Journal, in the memory of many of Ellmann’s interviewees and the photographs of Gisele Freund. When one looks through this prism, it is hard to recapture the handsome, scornful wunderkind who dazzled his university generation thirty years before, who told Yeats to his face that he was ‘too ...”

“... is a necessary evil,’ Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses. In Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann quoted Ivan Karamazov: ‘Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?’ ‘From the Urals to Donegal,’ Ellmann writes,the theme recurs, in Turgenev, in Samuel Butler, in Gosse. It is especially prominent ...”

“... well​ did Willie and Oscar know each other anyway? In the two massive Lives of Wilde, by Richard Ellmann and Matthew Sturgis, Hornung’s name is not mentioned once. Nor is there a single letter to or from Hornung in the equally massive Complete Letters, edited by Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, and Rupert Hart-Davis. Rowland has a whole ...”

“... cross in workshops, but we were in a literature class together, where the visiting professor, Richard Ellmann, had us read our own writing. I had a profound fear of public speaking, but when it was my turn, looking out over the classroom, I saw David and Heather’s faces smiling in encouragement. David in particular seemed like my own personal ...”

“... is a good example of the theory put into practice. But what he added in a footnote was scarier: ‘Richard Ellmann’s bitter, professional Joyce and the weary, enigmatical Wilde are portraits of the biographer as he worked on those big and beautiful books. The real biographies of Joyce and Wilde are the histories of the works they themselves set ...”