“... stayed on at Gad’s Hill. News of the others – Charley at Baring’s, Walter out in India, Frank trying to learn German in Hamburg, Sydney being accepted for the Navy, Alfred and Henry at various schools – is relayed in a style sometimes more cheery than convincing. Dickens’s treatment of his boys has been thought dictatorial, but the letters ...”

“... some sensitivity to the tricky business of naming. ‘What if we hadn’t had such great names?’ Frank O’Hara wonders in Nat Tate, the hoax biography that took in much of New York’s art establishment a few weeks ago: ‘what if we had been called Gilbert Kline, Jonathan Pollock, Cyril O’Hara, Jennifer Krasner, Timothy Rivers, Philip Tate?’ The ...”

“... as he waits in vain for an audience with the chairman of Gosplan – with a detailed X-ray close-up of Lebedev’s cancerous lungs: ‘A drifting, tumbling molecule of benzopyrene … sails into the cell’s bulging curtain wall of fats and sticks there, like an insect caught in glue; then, worse, is dragged through, because the fat curtain is spiked ...”

“... Senate.’ After he became leader of the Labour Party in 1963, Wilson placed much emphasis on close Anglo-American co-operation, going against his earlier position. He continued, however, to voice his opposition to any extension of the Vietnam conflict and in March 1964, and again in June, pressed the Conservative prime minister, Alec Douglas-Home, to ...”

“... to caricature as unimaginative defenders of their laager, others, including Desmond Boal, a close collaborator of the Democratic Unionist Party leader, Ian Paisley, were willing to explore the idea of a federal Ireland. Paisley was quick to retreat from this, but did not denounce his friend. (Indeed, Paisley’s reputation as an irreconcilable afforded ...”

“... Hardy, Robert Hichens, W.H. Hudson, Lubbock, H. de Vere Stacpoole are mentioned, also Forster’s close friend G.L. Dickinson. Of another, highly gifted friend, Virginia Woolf, he has very little to say, merely a glancing though favourable allusion. While he was writing Aspects of the Novel she published To the Lighthouse, a work he admired and found ...”

“... account of Boswell’s later life which was published six years ago by one of the present editors, Frank Brady – is the worse for its author’s frustrations, prostrations and despairs, interesting though he can sometimes make them appear; it conveys what can often seem like a bitter end for the likely lad from Ayrshire; Boswell’s last legs are apt to give ...”

“... Lambert – like many noted wits – was melancholic, something that he himself observed of his close friend Lord Berners, who (according to Lambert’s obituary of him) had a subtle technique for preserving solitude in railway compartments: he donned dark glasses and slyly beckoned the would-be intruder in. A brilliant natural musician, a gifted pianist ...”

“... another explicit sexual encounter of predictably little literary effect. The author tries to be frank and decent and open about it, but can’t, because the girlie magazines have got there first and muddied that pool. There were phrases elsewhere that I liked without comprehending – ‘ “It is the harvest of Orion!” cries Beth, and her shadow falls ...”

“... need to open a box, she herself is trouble personified. Pabst’s film is based on two plays by Frank Wedekind, The Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora’s Box (1904). His Lulu is a feral relative of the beautiful, damaging kept women who haunt 19th-century theatre and opera. A prologue to the first play tells us that she was ‘created to do harm, to tempt and ...”

“... He was interested in the proximity of a laugh to a rictus.) ‘Witty and funereal’ was how Frank O’Hara described Twombly’s sculptures early on. Poussin’s ‘The Arcadian Shepherds’ (c.1628-29) Across from the main exhibition is a room given over for the next two months to the Duke of Rutland’s five paintings, done by Poussin for ...”

“... through printed records as well as his own explorations, and in story after story he brings us close to the motley human lives that have been at home there. He tells the story of Charlotte Dymond, a farm servant at Penhale on the north edge of Bodmin Moor, whose throat was cut by her workmate Matthew Weeks in 1844 (several thousand people turned up to ...”

“... spattered down around my feet. Guillemot egg patterns To come upon a bird’s egg is to be close to a natural wonder, even if Birkhead is perhaps a shade too purple in saying that eggs ‘have an erotic aura all of their own’. My own sightings of eggs have been infrequent (collecting the eggs of Khaki Campbell ducks from among the reeds near a house ...”

“... were once bomb sites.The site proposed for new flats on the northern corner of Harrington Square, close to Mornington Crescent station, is one of those car parks. The houses that stood there were destroyed on the third day of the Blitz, soon after 5 p.m. on 9 September 1940. British Pathé newsreel footage shows people rushing to the underground shelter in ...”

“... In​ 1959, the French monthly Réalités ran a piece by Bernard Frank, a precocious novelist and former protégé of Sartre, explaining that a lost generation of young bourgeois had found their bearings in existentialism. Post-occupation and post-Vichy, he argued, the model hero was an impoverished intellectual, the model heroine an affectless free-thinker, and the typical pairing was a relationship in which ‘love’ was conspicuously absent ...”