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“... ever since. I used to see Worsthorne around the place, most usually in El Vino’s either at the close of Fleet Street’s daily business or (much more important to the ethos of the joint) about halfway through it. Here is where he had chummed up with Henry Fairlie, Paul Johnson, George Gale, Kingsley Amis and many of his other life-long boon ...”

“... ten years. Herbert Read was a year his junior. These are all figures with whom he had more or less close connections at one time or another, so the relativities are worth bearing in mind. Aldington’s father was a solicitor ‘at Dover and along the south coast’. Both parents had some claim to be considered writers, the books to their credit or discredit ...”

“... ladies determined to work at the White House. Though she did not live there, she became a close friend and confidante of the President’s wife. Mrs Lincoln’s lasting affection for ‘Lizzie’ is well-documented in her letters to Mrs Keckley, her dearest and, it would seem, only friend, and while Lizzie’s admiration for the petulant, indulged and ...”

“... as ‘painted grenadier-red’. That I.A. Richards should speak with enthusiasm of Forbes, his close friend, the collaborator who in 1919 had persuaded him to give up the notion of becoming a mountain guide on Skye and, instead, lecture for the Cambridge English Tripos, is what one would expect. A rare distinction for a member of the English Faculty is ...”

“... the fact that he was reopening a book which both Churchill and de Valera had decided peaceably to close almost exactly thirty years ago. That at any rate would be the charitable explanation. Within hours of his remarks, the Dail had been adjourned in uproar, the Irish ambassador in London was being told to protest to Whitehall, and the front pages of the ...”

“... it from his book and simply visited Sydney University at night with a spray can. White is direct, frank and unsensational about his homosexuality, which may well be a key to understanding his work and his life. He grew up in a wealthy family, comfortable, accustomed to servants (English and Scots) to whom he felt attached, undisturbed (he says), but ...”

“... genius as lyric poet that engages Foster most deeply. At the heart of Foster’s book is a close reading of a handful of poems (not always the obviously beautiful or famous ones), conducted with an exquisite sense of the way metrical and rhetorical structures embody the shifts and subtleties of thought and feeling. He provides what amounts to a manual ...”

“... even those whose work differed greatly from his own, such as Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris. Yet all of them, with the exception of Crane, ultimately turned on him and dismissed his work. It was inevitable that they should do so. They had learned from Howells himself to describe and defend their own realism by exposing the conventionality ...”

“... philosophy, architecture, mythology and modern art and where Shakespeare rubs shoulders with Frank Lloyd Wright, Nabokov with Aristotle, Newton with Cy Twombly. Fisher takes wonder where he finds it, in the Chicago skyline, Miranda’s exclamations in The Tempest or Descartes’s explanation of the rainbow. Experiences of wonder may be by definition ...”

“... water; or another of a tiny sailing ship floating on a sea of golden hair in meticulous close-up.Equally impressive is Maar’s street photography – a popular mode at the time – which, as Caws points out, ‘combines a strong sense of social justice with an eye for the uncanny’ and for inadvertent humour, as in Barcelona, her photograph of a ...”

“... unassailable classics, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks, pretty close. Partly the problem seems to have been Dylan’s bewilderment at the opportunities afforded by a modern 32-track studio. In the old days he’d go in with a batch of songs and record them as fast as possible. The solo Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964) was ...”

“... all these sentences could have been written by the same person, the person who wrote ‘Frank drops me off outside the sisters’ flat,’ ‘You could hear the kids yelling in the pool,’ ‘I could hear kids on the waste ground behind me,’ ‘The travel-agent smoked in the empty church’ – first sentences, by different writers, from an ...”

“... I still like to believe that players like Pancho Gonzales, Rod Laver, Lew Hoad, Jaroslav Drobny, Frank Sedgman, Don Budge and Jack Kramer were as good if not better than the present lot – Sampras, Agassi, Moya, Kafelnikov, Rios and so on. The only first-class pre-World War Two player I ever saw was Henri Cochet, who had occasionally beaten the great Tilden ...”

“... else can only be known by getting inside and asking questions. Tracking down a Sullivan Bank or a Frank Lloyd Wright house in its native habitat, seeing the physical context of buildings which also have an art-historical context: these are pleasures and an education. The assumptions which the taxonomy of style and the hierarchies of art history underpin can ...”

“... of a banker, owner of a Victorian house, mother of two. When Michel engages Natalie’s husband Frank in conversation about his attempts at investing online, it’s mildly embarrassing. Leah doesn’t covet the lifestyles of bankers and lawyers (except the way they can afford to be ‘moral’ by buying organic food); she spends more time fretting about why ...”