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“... reading took place at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on 7 October 1955. Michael McClure who also read that night along with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia, describes the poem’s impact in Scratching the Beat Surface (1982): I hadn’t seen Allen in a few weeks and I had not heard Howl – it was new to me. Allen began in a small and ...”

“... At his funeral, ‘in the same cathedral where she had eight months before been married’, she read a poem she had written in his memory. Two days later, ready to start her life again, she set off for Los Angeles with her husband. That was in March, three months after she was first taken ill. ‘Do you think I’ll be okay in California, she said. I said ...”

“... Hanns Eisler records a meeting between Brecht and Zweig in London. Brecht, who ‘of course never read a line of Zweig’ (one admires the economy of effort), sees him only as a possible source of funds for his theatre; Zweig, no doubt, is interested only in adding the notch of another great man to his metaphorical bedpost. Brecht asks Eisler for a ...”

“... photographs and things.Was there much reading going on in the house?By the time I was 16 I’d read every book in the house. There were popular boys’ books of an earlier time, for some reason: Henty, Ballantyne, that sort of thing. There were lots of self-educating books, home encyclopedias, home university courses, Pelmanism manuals, self-improvement ...”

“... bibliography there are few writers so admired and respected, few bodies of work so attentively read. To judge the value of Seymour-Smith’s approach to the life, we need to look at the way it illuminates the work. And in every genre, it seems to me, he fails to give critical back-up to his partisan zeal. He repeatedly asserts the pre-eminence of Hardy’s ...”

“... it ‘laissez-faire’, which is also a term of abuse for this odd sort of Tory. She’d say you read the Guardian: she’d say you came from Hampstead. That is the level of argument in her book. It is exceedingly entertaining, for she is an unwitting mistress of the double entendre; and it is endearing too, for there is a curious innocence about a woman who ...”

“... Last Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985) – and the writers she likes, notably the late Donald Barthelme. Above all she remembers. ‘I remember the day that the East Bronx began to become the South Bronx.’ ‘My love of country, any country, is always being interrupted in its patriotic advance by terrible remembrance.’ One of the finest pieces ...”

“... permanently morose, deformed in body and soul, to be pitied from a great height. I exaggerate, but Donald Bloch’s morbid novel supports my exaggeration. The narrator keeps making hyper-critical remarks about ‘we Africans’ with an exclamation-mark. ‘How generous we Africans can be, even with our very strong diseases! Yes, we like to give them ...”

“... most of their evenings at the Gargoyle Club, dancing to ‘Oh, you beautiful doll’ while Donald Maclean got drunk. They had, she says, some ‘idyllic years’ together, though the man Cyril Connolly called ‘the London Freddyair’ had his glum moments, waking his partner as he sang in his sleep ‘I’m always on the outside, on the outside ...”

“... the problem of employment policy, the Treatise has proved no less relevant than the Theory: ‘To read off “Keynesian” policy prescriptions from a single book can give, and has given, rise to systematic errors in applying his ideas.’ Skidelsky also sees more continuity than Clarke between Keynes’s thinking before and after the Slump. Keynes once said ...”

“... stick – and the protesters were singing ‘Oh Canada’ every chance they got.Didn’t they read the news? Apparently not. Many just wanted positive vibes, finding the MSM a real downer. ‘How can they prove all those people died of Covid? I don’t know a single person who’s died.’ Others had curated their internet feeds to show them only what ...”

“... lifelong enemy of slavery and an inveterate racist. The most recent full-scale biography, by David Donald, published in 1995, offered a Lincoln buffeted by forces outside his control, a man of few deep convictions who failed to lead public opinion – rather like Bill Clinton. Although conceived before 11 September, both Richard Carwardine and Daniel ...”

“... the daughter of John Ewing who worked with my father, I was not recruited to be a Quiz Kid (I read Salinger’s stories with some interest). Perhaps it would have taken nepotism a step too far – my Aunt Jean ran Broadcasts to Schools. It was a small world in which connections were easy. Jean married, quite late, Des Buckley, the brother of Pat ...”

“... and came to the conclusion that ‘the best mind in England’ belonged to Herbert Read. Cutting short his England trip, he and his wife headed off for Paris (Tate had married the fierce and ultra-Southern novelist, Caroline Gordon, a few years before: he would later marry her again, after a divorce, and then divorce her yet again). In ...”

“... quite suddenly, as I was looking for something else in the back pages of the impeccably learned (read: dry as dust) Review of English Studies for July 1949, there he was: ‘Frank Kermode’. Not, I was interested to note, ‘J.F. Kermode’ or any other variant that signalled the first name he never used. (It was one of the lesser indignities of his time in ...”