“... dialectic between ‘the daily life with its successes and disasters’ and ‘the inner life of a painter who might have said, with Jung: “If I had left these images hidden in my emotions, they might have torn me in pieces.”’ The work’s images thus become what Fitzgerald, following her subject, calls its ‘burden’, the points at which physical ...”

“... for God’s sake, I don’t need it.’ James Knowlson’s biography reports that when his painter friend Henri Hayden was hospitalised in 1962 he looked after the Haydens’ tax bills as well as their rent. Beckett was, in other words, beginning to resemble the otherworldly, saintly figure of later legend, down to being, by this stage, craggily ...”

“... and later donated to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, where it still resides. When the Romantic painter Benjamin Robert Haydon heard news of the discovery he wrote excitedly to his friend Keats: ‘If this is not Shakespeare who is it? … As sure as you breathe & that he was the first of beings the Seal belonged to him – Oh Lord!’ The sceptic might ...”

“... by learning to box, by falling in love with a boy he referred to as ‘Dick’ (actually called George Harcourt Vanden-Bempde-Johnstone, later 3rd Baron Derwent), and by joining a poetry society run by some charismatic masters. He said in his autobiography, Goodbye to All That, written in 1929 when he was only 34, that by the end of his time at Charterhouse ...”

“... is assumed if the individual belongs to a dominant group (‘white writer’ or ‘heterosexual painter’, for instance). If I’m opposed to routine psychological reductionism or any other attempt to formulate a totalising interpretation of an individual, by the same token I distrust a resistance to the obvious. Genet was homosexual and wrote about ...”

“... Similarly, allegorical or other references to the end of time link writers and works as diverse as George Bernard Shaw (Heartbreak House), Henri Barbusse (Under Fire) and Karl Kraus (The Last Days of Mankind). They all, Winter argues, ‘turned back to the ancient tradition of apocalyptic drama’. Even the English war poets, usually Exhibit A for Hynes and ...”

“... in themselves, and with potentially terrible consequences of exposure and professional ruin. Sir George Mowbray Bt, chairman of Berkshire County Council, spent a drunken hour in Piccadilly Circus underground station, where he ‘smiled, nodded and looked’ at other men. In court he explained he was happily married with three children and at home ‘drank ...”

“... parts of London agreed to behave as if the fictions of J.G. Ballard were planning documents, the painter Gavin Jones, working covertly and alone, excavated a wartime bunker hidden beneath a grassy mound outside a block of council flats in Bow. He disguised the entrance with an upturned boat, ran out electrical cables and made himself a set of dank ...”

“... was financial. She had no money and there were many debts. Philip Burne-Jones, the son of the painter, wrote to her on 11 April with advice from Sir George Lewis, who had once been a friend but had acted for Douglas’s father in the case: Sir George was most anxious that as soon as ...”

“... do what Baldwin’s friend Eugene Worth did in 1946: he will finally jump to his death off the George Washington Bridge. Baldwin later said that there were no fictional antecedents for Rufus: ‘He was in the novel because I don’t think anyone had ever watched the disintegration of a black boy from that particular point of view. Rufus was partly ...”

“... to the town, or to the country? Would he have been more at home in Tolstoy or in Turgenev? What painter could have done justice to his appearance? How did he look at his best? On all these matters conflicting views were expressed, and, when it came to the last question, a dry, shrill voice, coming from a young man, rose to a peak: ‘I think Dad looks best ...”

“... Maugham is Of Human Bondage. It’s easy to see why post-1918 adolescents – including George Orwell – thrilled as the scales fell from the eyes of Philip Carey, the club-footed but otherwise Maugham-like student hero: It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are ...”

“... impossible to imagine Altamont or Live Aid, Michael Jackson on the Thames, Bono cold calling George Bush mid-gig, Katy Perry in orbit. No personal touchscreen beckoning itchy fingers. Just gazing dreamily into the distance or cycling about aimlessly on long summer afternoons. Boredom and its cloud-drift antidotes. Boredom as something almost ...”

“... were then unsigned. Individual voices such as Updike’s – and, later, Jamaica Kincaid’s and George W.S. Trow’s – managed to peep up despite the magazine’s horse collar of wry urbanity. A volume of Updike’s Talk from the Fifties sits on my shelf, a memento of a metropolitan flâneur with notepad at the ready, sniffing in the sights.Updike went on ...”

“... lesbian salonnière Natalie Barney; Dolly Wilde (Oscar’s opium-addicted niece); Marie Laurencin, painter and friend of Picasso; the Ballets Russes dancer Tamara Karsavina; the photographer Berenice Abbott; modernist designer Eileen Gray; Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson, editors of the avant-garde literary magazine the Little Review; not to mention ...”