“... Soleil’ that anticipates the urban poetics of another ardently Francophile American poet, Frank O’Hara, Baudelaire figures his traversing of the streets of Paris as an aleatory means of exploring simultaneously the city, the self, and the possibilities of poetry: Flairant dans tous les coins les hasards de la rime, Trébuchant sur les mots comme ...”

“... a local duchess strongly suggest a rather comfortable style of rebellion. Little wonder that Dylan Thomas, who came across the Out of Bounds group in the mid-1930s, thought they had ‘no idea of what they priggishly call “the class struggle” … They are bogus from skull to navel.’ The sequel to the elopement and marriage was marked by tragedy. Romilly ...”

“... Regina seems to have been), gets punched in the face by a black woman and suffers a stroke; Thomas accidentally shoots his mother dead in ‘The Comforts of Home’, and in ‘A Circle in the Fire’, Mrs Cope (like Regina, a widowed mother with a daughter) has the woods that surround her farm set ablaze by three vandals from the city. One of ...”

“... of delirious associations and interpretations’, and the crazy-enough-to-be-true projections of Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard (who wrote incisively about Surrealism). The afterlife of Surrealism is more active in poetry, as in the New York School of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and ...”

“... sonic properties of birdsong ‘long before anyone else’, then adds in parenthesis that ‘to be frank’ everyone has ‘always’ been interested in the subject.Honesty in this novel is associated with impulsive action and plain speech, and freedom from calculation, obfuscation and coldness. After the interruption Braithwaite explains that he wasn’t ...”

“... what Orwell meant by designating his background ‘lower upper middle class’. His grandfather, Thomas Blair, was a clergyman, not to be confused with the Rev. Blair of Richard Ingrams’s satiric imagination. (It is odd, incidentally, to read books which so regularly couple together the words ‘Blair’ – Orwell’s real name – and ...”

“... swollen lips’; ‘I was unbathed, unshaven, and had had no bowel movement.’ Lastly, there is frank panic, not unmixed with lust: This was a lone child, an absolute waif, with whom a heavy-limbed, foul-smelling adult had had strenuous intercourse three times that very morning. Whether or not the realisation of a lifelong dream had surpassed all ...”

“... are inspiring neighbours to slit each others’ throats.12 March. Reading P. Ackroyd’s Thomas More, which I finish today, leaves me in two minds, the tolerance and scepticism of the author of Utopia and the dogmatism and heresy-hunting of the lawyer never adding up and not short of hypocrisy. It’s hard not to feel there is something specifically ...”

“... decision for apparent bias, but that it was the four judicial conservatives, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito, who voted to uphold the judgment. They may also now know that, thanks to a subsequent Supreme Court ruling, Massey need no longer channel its subventions through its chairman: it can donate to judicial re-election campaigns corporately and ...”

“... how to read the poems. One anecdote that Parker does not pass on to us concerns a meeting with Frank Harris, in which Housman took offence at Harris’s suggestion that the final stanza of ‘1887’, the introductory poem of A Shropshire Lad, was darkly intended. The poem remembers the Silver Jubilee celebrations, and Housman tests an ossified ...”

“... instead David Lynch, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Marcel Duchamp, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, Hugo Ball, Geoff Dyer, Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis.Lamb deserves​ much better than this. He deserves, most of all, an account that makes you want to read him. His prose only intermittently wears ...”

“... of over-cautious civil servants whom the Minister has it in his power to disregard. I write to Frank Dobson, my MP, saying, intemperately, that the Minister is more of a coward than many of the men who were executed. [I have not had a reply.] Yorkshire, 15 August. To Pateley Bridge on a lovely afternoon of flashing sunshine and rushing clouds, the drive ...”

“... like a pious fish – and then we were up on our feet, and were singing ‘O Nata Lux’ by Thomas Tallis1. I knew the piece but hadn’t really listened to it. Now I was struck – assaulted, thrown – by its utter beauty: the soft equanimity of its articulation, like the voice of justice; the sweet dissonance, welcome as pain. That dissonance, with ...”

“... his. The risible and tragic implications of one-sided boy infatuation were understood long before Thomas Mann.Traces of real affection are discernible in the archives. A Portuguese sacristan sent plaintive love letters to a guitarist, recalling ‘the heart in your loins, when I touched it with my fingers, and instantly it sprang up!’ The letters survive ...”

“... and interesting exploration of his theme centres on the third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, who accessed over a third of the country’s land area in one purchase from the French, then ordered it to be surveyed by a government expedition led by army captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. For Jefferson, American topography was ...”