“... poet Charles Bukowski mentioned his debt to Fante in his novel Women; Bukowski’s publisher, John Martin of the Black Sparrow Press, set about reprinting Fante’s books. Bukowski, who had been devoted to both books ‘like a man who had found gold in the city dump’ since discovering them by chance in the early 1950s, contributed an autobiographical preface ...”

“... that sort of thing. ‘Roland W. Hayes, coloured tenor – Can’t see any value in his voice,’ Thomas Edison wrote in 1919, when Hayes tried to record for Edison’s label. When Hayes did record, fronting the money himself, he made a point of recording ‘Vesti la giubba’ from Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. The aria had been recorded several times already by ...”

“... that developed between analytic and Continental philosophy, the latter epitomised by the likes of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. But the taxonomy is bizarre, as Bernard Williams once complained, since it contrasts a method or approach to philosophy with a geographical region, ‘rather as though one divided cars into front-wheel drive and ...”

“... think we know nothing of neurochemistry, he just emphasises how modest our knowledge is. He quotes Thomas Insel, the former head of the National Institute for Mental Health, who said after thirteen years in the job: ‘I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalisations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who ...”

“... up leaders it favours. Bongo père et fils were typical. So was Blaise Compaoré, who toppled Thomas Sankara – president of Burkina Faso, and still a hero for young West African opposition activists – in 1987. Sankara was murdered during the putsch and Compaoré went on to run the country for more than 25 years. After an uprising in 2014, French ...”

“... The prose satires of the Elizabethan Presbyterian author who called himself (or themselves) ‘Martin Marprelate’ had a freewheeling energy. He accosted Elizabethan bishops with words such as ‘bumfeage’ (which probably means something like ‘whip the arse of’) and with such comic success that the ecclesiastical establishment was prompted to enlist ...”

“... of homosexual fellatio’. Then he cools us down. ‘That is to move too far ahead.’ Thomas Carlyle, another prodigious filler of shelves, reckoned that ‘the history of the world is but the biography of great men.’ The pathos formula perfected by Ackroyd. Carlyle did not enjoy such a smooth passage. ‘Swimming in the Mother of Dead Dogs, and ...”

“... and bulimic vulgarity got the genius it deserved,’ only to write a little later, apropos of Thomas McEvilley’s remark that ‘somehow the age demanded’ Schnabel: ‘the notion that the man is an emanation of the Zeitgeist no doubt matches the artist’s fantasies about himself.’ It also, of course, matches what Hughes has just said about him. I ...”

“... found Nabokov ‘rich in what is given to few writers and poor in what is given to most men’. Martin Seymour-Smith, reviewing Laughter in the Dark, described Nabokov as ‘a kind of Satanic Mantovani, coming into cruel close-up on your screens at the end of the compelling torment to ask (the question mark ironic): “You have been distressed by my ...”

“... Paris he abandoned both his mother tongue – and, with it, the Joycean extravagance of what Dylan Thomas called his ‘Sodom and Begorrah’ mode – and the brilliant procrusteanism of his avant-garde writing of the Thirties. Writing now in French, he produced the four nouvelles and the trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, books in which he ...”

“... him. But there are interesting moments when he takes a moral position; for example, when Dylan Thomas, who annoyed him by making assumptions about his relationship with Spender, irritated him further by boasting how well he, Thomas, had done out of a visit to Peter Watson to touch him for money. ‘I thought that was a ...”

“... it was as though my schoolfellows and I had stumbled into the pages of ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ or another of the horrid inventions in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Led past stacks of disintegrating coffins, from which skulls and yellowing bones spilled across the dusty floor, we were introduced to the crypt’s ...”

“... In 1865, a year after John Clare’s death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare ...”

“... to a prominent Lobby figure, had ‘displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns’. Thomas Dine, the head of AIPAC at the time, explained what happened: ‘All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the American politicians – those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire – got the ...”

“... Indiana, could point to what he believed to be the coincidental birth years of Hernan Cortes and Martin Luther in arguing that the horrific spread of heresy in Northern Europe had been miraculously compensated for by the opening of huge new areas for the true faith’s dissemination in the New World. For some at least, the sense of religious mission was ...”