“... in January 1948 garnered little attention, and nothing sold from a de Kooning exhibition at Charles Egan Gallery in April. ‘Isolation,’ Greenberg wrote that year, was ‘the natural condition of high art in America’, and soon the Existentialist talk of alienation was matched by the political reality, as the House Un-American Activities Committee ...”

“... from copies of the book and mounted to catch the eye of serial sentimentalists in antique markets. Charles I, a cloaked and lace-collared dandy, strolls across the park to his execution. Queen Matilda, hooded like Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, escapes across a winter landscape. The princes in the Tower are a suspect download soliciting close ...”

“... zone of large mid-Victorian properties divided into flats. I noticed a Methodist church with a wood-faced turret and a selection of hostels for backpacking passerines. But despite such awkward neighbours, and a degree of spillage from Finsbury Park kerb-crawlers, and the all too evident desperation of bruised addict-prostitutes, Wilberforce Road throbs ...”

“... week at least, Wilde was as much an ordinary man as a flamboyant artist who willed his own demise. Charles Ricketts, who designed books for him, wrote that ‘most writers on Wilde see in him the aesthete, the predestined victim of a theory, and the martyr to a subversive cult.’ This was wrong: ‘His childish hints at strange sins in Dorian Gray and other ...”

“... of English Poets”!’ he wrote to Emily Hale in February 1933, halfway through his year as Charles Eliot Norton professor at Harvard. The lecture included the following considerations (transcribed by his brother Henry):The desire to write a letter, to put down what you don’t want anybody else to see but the person you are writing to, but which yet ...”

“... Portnoy’s Complaint I’m not surprised at Dad’s reaction when he found it in my bookcase at Wood Lane fifty years ago. In some misguided missionary zeal that makes me cringe even to remember I may actually have recommended it. Because if it shocked him then it shocks me now, though I don’t imagine he read more than a few pages before putting it back ...”

“... batter running down the side of a mixing bowl, and that day her skin, like the furniture and the wood floors, glistened in the humidity. Her eyes had a faintly Asian slant that made her look almost seductive. Her face was narrower, longer, than it had seemed in pictures, and her nose in profile was colossal and angled in the middle. She had a broad and ...”

“... theologians who are meanwhile busy inventing Christian metaphysics: ‘There’s a solid chunk of wood waiting for them to have their silly heads knocked against.’ And, once discovered, the mere existence of the crucifix in all its solidity somehow comes to be an adequate proof for the whole Christian system. ‘It states a fact,’ Waugh says on the last ...”

“... books I swotted up for my scholarship. Remembering Bruce MacFarlane was at Dulwich, I wander into Charles Barry’s huge hammerbeam hall, the walls lined with honours boards of distinctions at Oxford and Cambridge chiefly; though there’s some mention of the Army and the Indian Civil Service, there is none of any other universities or places of higher ...”

“... McKenna in 1957 It was strange being alone with these two books; even the names of the poets – Charles Tomlinson, or David Gascoyne, or Robert Conquest, or John Holloway, or Christopher Middleton, or Geoffrey Hill – stood for a world that was fully England. Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished ...”

“... of art; but at the time there was lively curiosity and interchange between Paris and London. Charles Deschamps, who sold Henry Hill his pictures, was a patron and friend of Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown and Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and later of Whistler. Monet came to London to avoid the Franco-Prussian War, Pissarro to avoid political persecution; both ...”

“... Wychwood used to stretch from Woodstock to Burford but now only Blenheim and Cornbury remain. Charles I gave Cornbury to Clarendon and the palatial house was built by the minister after the Restoration. The park is full of army lorries now, but the golden-stoned house looking down on the string of lakes is visible through the medieval oaks, We walked ...”

“... would sit on the high-backed armchair, stretching out one hand a little towards the blaze of the wood fire on the hearth and talking of the dullest things possible to Ford Madox Brown who . . . sat on the other side of the fire in another high-backed chair and, stretching out towards the flames his other hand, disagreed usually with Mr Wilde on subjects ...”

“... house with embroidered curtains, a stereo, a television, a large drinks bar made of finely worked wood and framed photos of him and his wife, Rosa-Isela, Pancho’s sister. ‘All this comes from my work,’ he says sadly, standing in the middle of the living-room, in front of a blue velour sofa where a small child is sleeping calmly. ‘But I fell into ...”

“... of the Free City of Danzig in 1927, then under the protection of the League of Nations, and like Charles Dickens, Jan Neruda, James Joyce, Theodor Fontane and his acknowledged exemplar Alfred Döblin, he places his native city at the centre of his creative imagination. Grass’s best work so far is given over, again and again, to its evocation: a very ...”