“... reading is interesting, though heavily indebted to Grant Richards. Housman read Proust and James; he enjoyed Colette; he much admired the work of Edith Wharton. Mr Graves finds it surprising that he neglected the opportunity to cultivate the society of E.M. Forster: my guess would be that he did not think much more highly of Forster’s work than he ...”

“... poem’s account of drunken officers shooting at steerage passengers was already in circulation: Lawrence Beesley, a second-class survivor, was denying it in his book within weeks of the sinking. Enzensberger’s steerage immigrants (‘Wogs, Jews, camel drivers and Polacks’) are the direct kin of those we see in Ragtime sailing into New York harbour ...”

“... have? Even Freud was able to get this much maths right in his famous remark to Fliess (cited by Lawrence Durrell at the start of The Alexandria Quartet and also here by Garber): ‘You are certainly right about bisexuality. I am also getting used to regarding every sexual act as one between four individuals.’ (Garber presents a lively history of the ...”

“... the city – has caught up with us. The trees around me are dying, the Great Lakes and the St Lawrence River are, like so many other waterways, poison. There are thermonuclear bombs, and, though it has not quite sunk into popular consciousness yet, information theoretic (computer-controlled) weapons may have passed through the glitch stage (Vietnam) to ...”

“... the first war photographer to be killed in action. He was one of the many forerunners of T.E. Lawrence (who greatly admired Shakespear), each of them convinced that an alliance with his preferred tribe could offer the key to Britain’s problems in the region. Claudius Rich, the consul at Baghdad in the 1810s, deeply admired the Kurds and the more ...”

“... the Royal Navy was riddled with popery and that the Duke of York (Lord High Admiral and the future James II) had wasted public funds. A select committee was appointed to investigate. When his enemies won the general election in March, the duke fled. In his absence, Samuel Pepys, as secretary of the navy, was left to face the music. Pepys was found guilty of ...”

“... Hogarth’, exemplified in particular in a critique of his work by the Irish painter and critic James Barry. Acknowledging Hogarth’s merit – his ‘admirable fund of invention’, the moral quality of his satire, ‘seldom or never employed in a dishonest or unmanly way’ – Barry had nevertheless claimed that his ‘general aim’ was not to ‘reach ...”

“... the limitations of pure abstraction. A third text, The Perception of the Visual World (1950) by James J. Gibson, ‘a study of how motion affects a viewer in a three-dimensional space’, also played an important role in his art-making (Duchamp was interested in such questions too). During this period Hamilton spent many hours on the train from London to ...”

“... and even lover that places Marx in the company of ‘Keats, Dickens, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence’. Marxist thought and the Modernist tradition converge for Berman, as both try to grasp and confront the modern experience: Marx’s ‘new-fangled men ... as much the invention of ...”

“... have been better selected; if the younger Sickert deserves any credence, a certain Francis E. James is one of the great painters of the 1890s, but maybe his works, like many others mentioned here, have sunk too deep in the historical oubliette to be retrieved. And then, one might complain that the sheer scholarly discretion of the editing under-represents ...”

“... atmosphere, and its Black nationalist politics, off-putting.She wanted to go to Sarah Lawrence College, but it was too expensive, so she settled instead for a public college in New York. She often had to pause her studies to earn money, working in a factory, as a social worker, an X-ray technician and a medical administrator. She had her first ...”

“... relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types – William James being another and later example – to mistake manhood for the capacity to endure pre-arranged physical hardship. Their version, no doubt, of the English public school. It will be obvious that Leverenz likes to stay close to home – as with ...”

“... Fools’ War’. In his excellent introduction to this selection of Larkin’s letters home, James Booth quotes from its first page to demonstrate the nature of Larkin Senior’s political views: ‘Those who had visited Germany were much impressed by the good government and order of the country as by the cleanliness and good behaviour of the people ...”

“... even part of the chain of command. And what about the four-star generals who surround Trump: James Mattis, who as secretary of defence is second in the chain of command, or John Kelly, the chief of staff, who isn’t in the chain of command but would probably be consulted on the decision? ‘These are people who have grown up ...”