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“... Even the performers were ready to shove and push to make sure of a good position on the stage: ‘young White, son of the keeper of the county gaol … & a pretty good player … being willing to secure the uppermost place for himself, jostled me against the door at the end of the orchestra where I had but little enjoyment of the concert.’ In his ...”

“... read to him from birth; but they only really sounded like Thomas. And, unusually for an ambitious young poet of the time, Thomas was not trying too hard to be original: there just seemed to be something he could do with words that no one else could do. He was, in that sense, tailor-made for the romantic myth of the poet as self-fashioned ...”

“... with what has been logged as ‘the most complained about event in the history of the BBC’: not Kenneth Tynan saying ‘fuck’ on air, or a programme giving equal time to an alleged IRA commander and a loyalist hardliner, or even the proposal to alter the timing of the shipping forecast, but the blanket coverage given to the death of Prince Philip in ...”

“... He had mined the archive for The James Family and for his long-authoritative edition (with Kenneth Murdock) of The Notebooks of Henry James, which came out in the same year; together with Henry James: The Major Phase (1944), these made him the central force in the field. With his going, there was only Leon Edel (who in due course encouraged his ...”

“... And a clutch of recent biographies has toppled several notable royal icons from their pedestals. Kenneth Rose depicted George V as an ogre so boorish and philistine that in retrospect he appears almost pathetically comical. In his books on Edward VIII, Michael Bloch has washed a great deal of the Abdication dirty linen in public, and much of the mud has ...”

“... was well represented by writers who weren’t New York intellectuals at all. We could think of Kenneth Burke, R.P. Blackmur, Allen Tate, many more. But Mrs Trilling’s point is important. What hides in the phrase ‘general culture’ is the belief that literature and culture and politics are connected, that controversy is good and bad for the mind and ...”

“... The Shell-Mex advertising campaign, lavishly praised by art critics such as Clive Bell and Kenneth Clark, appeared at a time when motoring was still more or less a luxury pursuit. Yet these initiatives made possible the ‘common culture’ of Britain in the Thirties. A ‘common culture’ is a slippery concept: to what extent does it genuinely need ...”

“... for more traditional school syllabuses or by more conventional behaviour on the part of the young. But all of that is happening on a more modest scale. It could become less modest if there was a real threat to the stability of society – for instance, from an escalation of inner-city rioting. But for the moment the shift has been not from Progress to ...”

“... This voice, when it says, ‘One is ignored,’ turns itself away from the door of its own self. Kenneth Allott admitted to feeling put off by the fineness of ‘Tramontana at Lerici’ when anthologising the poem in 1962. Understandably, though mistakenly, he wrote that ‘human beings and their awkwardnesses have been squeezed out.’ Yet there is a world ...”

“... as Traven’s knowledge of the IWW (the International Workers of the World, or Wobblies). The poet Kenneth Rexroth, himself of German descent and an ex-Wobbly, suggested that Traven was in fact a German-American, brought up in a community where the mother tongue was spoken, and that at some period in his life before going to Mexico he had been a wandering ...”

“... Born,​ out of wedlock, in Rome in 1880 to a high-spirited, convent-educated but unconventional young aristocrat of Russian, Polish and Italian descent, the poet Apollinaire was given no fewer than five prénoms by his mother: his full name, in its French version, was Guillaume-Albert-Wladimir-Alexandre-Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky ...”

“... other than in written notes. George was now next in line to the throne after his father, but the young duke and duchess of York soon found that royal powerlessness began at home. It took them years to rescue their eldest sons from the clutches of a sadistic nanny who cut short the boys’ meetings with their parents by administering cruel pinches. For all ...”

“... facings to leave misshapen stains. I look for things here that make old men and dead men seem young. Things which have escaped, the landscapes of many childhoods. Wharves, the oldest parts of factories, tarred gable ends rearing to take the sun over lower roofs. Soot, sunlight, brick-dust; and the breath that tastes of them. There’s that sort of ...”

“... served in some advisory capacity. The words themselves have been assembled by Chris Michel (the young speechwriter and devoted acolyte who went to Yale with Bush’s daughter Barbara); a freelance editor, Sean Desmond; the staff at Crown Publishing (who reportedly paid $7 million for the book); a team of a dozen researchers; and scores of ‘trusted ...”

“... Germany (he still hadn’t seen that the more imminent danger lay with Otho at home), he adopted a young aristocrat to be his successor: Lucius Calpurnius Piso Frugi Licinianus. Piso was murdered, with Galba, five days later. The adoption of Piso is the first major event in Tacitus’ Histories, which opens with the beginning of the year 69 and originally ...”