“... moving in any direction’. He called one of his long sequences ‘Liquid Mercury’. ‘Any word may be as beautiful as water so long as it is free of restraints,’ he wrote. In an interview with the translator Simon Patton, he said: I thought the important thing about language at that time was not to change its form, not a question of how you used it ...”

“... keeps me from better things’) when he killed the sleuth at the Reichenbach Falls on 4 May 1891. But reader demand obliged him to resurrect Holmes in 1893, and again in 1903 and 1921. It wasn’t that the author wanted to do it, just that the dollars offered by his American publisher were more than he could refuse. Rider Haggard killed his most ...”

“... first book, The Early Italian Poets. Restoring Dante Gabriel’s work to its original pre-eminence may prove a difficult task, despite the aid of a biography written without spite or condescension and this good edition of the writings. But is that restoration desirable? Probably not, at least if we want to recover from Rossetti and his work the values he has ...”

“... War were mutilated by his editors, pilloried by his critics and celebrated by such admirers as Ernest Hemingway: ‘When the fakers are all dead they will read Matthews in the schools to find out what really happened,’ Hemingway announced in 1938. But nothing compared with the rage and opprobrium that followed the publication of his Castro ...”

“... themselves out of business: why go off to live at the edge of a pond, like Thoreau, when you may as well explore the relation of human sociability to nature over a book on the subject, or a lavish transformation of raw into cooked? (It’s also noticeable that nature writing hasn’t caught on there as it has in the UK: in France writing is still first ...”

“... The day he first met Wyndham Lewis, shortly after the end of the First World War, Ernest Hemingway was teaching Ezra Pound how to box. The encounter took place in Paris, where Pound had a studio, and Lewis, impassive beneath his trademark wide black hat, seemed content to watch in silence. ‘Ezra had not been boxing very long and I was embarrassed at having him work in front of anyone he knew, and I tried to make him look as good as possible,’ Hemingway wrote ...”

“... precise verses of yearning and revelation that he published in slim volumes. He was 34 when, in May 1914, he stood up to speak at the Zurichsee Doctors’ Society. Everyone was looking in the wrong place, he said. The cause of the conditions was not a germ or genetic defect, but something missing. Not an agent, but an absence.Touch​ your neck, just above ...”

“... contradictory attitudes derive from a common source and are interdependent, whereas mixed feelings may be based on a realistic assessment of the imperfect nature of the object.’ Love and hate – a too simple vocabulary, and so never quite the right names – are the common source, the elemental feelings with which we apprehend the world; they are ...”

“... of the lyric etc. The novel is in that sense always ‘lawless’, as Gide liked to say, and we may have to raise some questions when someone like Henry James comes along and offers to codify its new ‘laws’ in doctrines like ‘point of view’. Even though he is virtually absent from this book, for reasons I will come to, Faulkner offered his own ...”

“... announcement on the editorial tannoy, ‘There is another version of these lines in T.MS, which may not be quoted,’ and rejoice that the College has, as Ricks puts it, ‘chosen one form of piety over another’. The remark shows something like superhuman restraint when you consider that the ban was lifted later in the same year that his edition was ...”

“... The British Army occupied Jerusalem on Sunday, 9 December 1917, and withdrew on 14 May 1948. During its brief imperium in the Promised Land, Britain kept the promise made in 1917 by its Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, in the Declaration that bears his name, ‘to favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people ...”

“... walk. When we want to turn back the clock we are not giving up on time. Turning back, in short, may involve reconsideration; giving up suggests abandonment (and if we really give up there is no turning back). Both are reversals of a kind, expressions of doubt about progress and desire, or at least about direction and purpose. So it is essentially an anxiety ...”

“... always another step worth taking away from the well-turned ornament. ‘Memory’ is undated. It may have been written before the ‘Last Poems’ of 1872, sometimes known as ‘New Poems’ or ‘Songs’, but this is where it has come to rest in the running order. It is a difficult, unaccommodating poem, despite the impartial courtesies of the 12-syllable ...”

“... singers, Cash clearly had some quality-control issues, but he also had a sense of humour; the one may indeed be the result of the other. The legendary album At Folsom Prison, for example, features him singing not only ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ and ‘Cocaine Blues’, but also the Jack Clement number ‘Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart’, which has ...”

“... was accepted mainly because it was so blindingly obvious to all save the most abject blimps. (They may have included some leading politicians – Churchill initially, and Ernest Bevin.) The disparity between Britain’s postwar situation and her colonial responsibilities was just too huge. Hyam spends some time debating ...”