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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Lighthouse, the Hogarth Press republished this assessment along with Muir’s pieces on Joyce, Lawrence, Huxley, Eliot and other distinctively modern writers in Transition: Essays on Contemporary Literature; they also published his second collection of poetry in 1926, and in May 1927, along with To the Lighthouse, his first novel, The Marionette. This ...”

“... a twenty-year sentence for armed robbery. Himes had already seen his share of troubles but, as Lawrence Jackson writes in his impressive biography, they ‘did not inspire him’ the way that ‘stumbling through the gore of two cell block tiers’ worth of burned-alive men’ did. After the fire, Himes began to write fiction on a typewriter he had bought ...”

“... gets mail four times a week, and I wondered if they minded. ‘It seems very reasonable,’ said Lawrence MacEwen, whose family owns the island. ‘I would even be quite happy if we had less. About three times a week is probably plenty.’ According to law, the Royal Mail must empty each of Britain’s 115,000 postboxes and deliver any letter to any of ...”