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“... James novel, and all he thinks about is his neighbour’s legacy, or more precisely ‘what old Frank would have done with the fruits of his swindle, on the occasion of the rupture that had kept them apart in hate and vituperation for so many years’. It’s a great beginning, but what we have of the completed novel is only more of the beginning. The ...”

“... Such predatoriness might be put down to nominative determinism: ‘Shchukin’, I was informed, is close to shchouka, Russian for ‘pike’. Both Morozov and Shchukin bought Impressionists and post-Impressionists; they were equally avid for Monet and Cézanne and Van Gogh and Gauguin and Matisse. Shchukin had eight Cézannes, Morozov 18; Shchukin had 16 ...”

“... of 1935, when he was 18, Robert Lowell and two friends from St Mark’s School – Blair Clark and Frank Parker – rented a house in Nantucket. Under Lowell’s direction, they studied the Bible (with special attention to the Book of Job) and ate cereal with raw honey and ‘badly’ cooked eels. Lowell decided that Clark should quit smoking and, when Clark ...”

“... named characters get drawn into Vernon’s orbit and Despentes enters and exits their heads using close third-person narration, sometimes switching focus several times in a single chapter. The plot dilates and dilates to introduce different ‘types’ of contemporary Parisian: a trans e-cigarette salesman, a far-right moped courier, a secondary school ...”

“... listening, offering responses, outwardly quite normal – an illusion that lasted until one came close enough to hear what she was saying. What sounded like real words, even real phrases, ‘eerie felicities’, as Bayley called them, still sometimes came out of her mouth. It is impossible to know what such things mean when they come from someone for whom ...”

“... inventiveness and inquisitiveness. In his ‘Answer to Voznesensky – Evtushenko’, Frank O’Hara writes: ‘We are tired of your tiresome imitations of Mayakovsky/we are tired of your dreary tourist ideas of our Negro selves.’ O’Hara’s rebuff to the two Russian poets shows him as a weird and unsuspected nationalist: but it also makes ...”

“... offensively beautiful, tactless, irritating, unknowable man – unknowable in spite of his frank gaze – we have to wait for the family biography and for the definitive study by Alan Crawford. Meanwhile Fiona MacCarthy has written The Simple Life, an excellent introduction to C.R.A. and his most ambitious experiment. This was the Great Move of ...”

“... that a very great artist – who has now in a sensationally short space of time become a very close friend – unexpectedly asked if I would like to be drawn by him. I refer, of course, to Lucian Freud, the product of whose activity is to be seen on the cover of the London Review of Books. I do not think I hesitated for a moment when he asked me. I was ...”

“... in particular, are reminiscent of the stylised portraits of Modigliani (Hamnett was a close friend of his). Her bust-length paintings aren’t set in recognisable interiors but place their sitters against muted backgrounds of grey, blue, ochre, brown with a hint of green. In a preface to Hamnett’s show at the Eldar Gallery in 1918, Sickert – a ...”

“... But even with these advantages, the History of Greece, ranging ‘from the earliest period to the close of the generation contemporary with Alexander the Great’, was a work of heroic industry in reading, sifting, assimilating and composing; nor was it all he did for the understanding of classical Greece, for he was to go on to write Plato and the Other ...”

“... in Gargnano, Brescia Province, where a large part of The Rotters’ Club was written’ comes close). And yet he’s only being honest. A Touch of Love is indeed influenced by Simone Weil and it is only polite to thank those who have assisted the author with country retreats and Martinis at five. Confessions are evidence of a conscience, and thus to be ...”

“... shared the romance of being a part of it in old New York. For me, the city didn’t just mean Frank Sinatra and Studio 54, it meant Alfred Kazin and Lionel Trilling, Lillian Hellman and Susan Sontag. I loved its papers, the swagger of the contributors, the New York intellectuals, with their neuroses, their arguments, their marriages, and their ...”

“... than the present action is likely to give rise to. But it was in any case the representation of a close-up war: physically distant on the earth but physically close in the lens. What has been happening in the South Atlantic, up to the point where British troops went back on the islands, has been a war of technical ...”

“... to seem exaggerated. He was pilloried as an advocate of ‘free love’, and the scandal of the close connection between his own unorthodox love life and that of the sexually emancipated heroines of his novels Ann Veronica (1909) and The New Machiavelli (1911) for a while put him beyond the pale even for some of the more progressive sections of London ...”

“... us in his topic more than we expected to be – but seems less so if we recall the preface to Frank Manuel’s earlier work, The Prophets of Paris, a book which has been incorporated, largely unchanged, into the present history and constitutes, in my judgment, its strongest section. ‘The tracing of disembodied moral and philosophical ...”