“... vanquishes her pupil by giving him false, irresistible confidence in his own abilities. Roger Lonsdale identified a similar dynamic in Johnson’s sometimes disturbingly fierce reactions to the ‘seductive powers of eloquence’ and ‘overpowering pleasure’ of poetry. Documenting those responses while seeking to reframe them in general ...”

“... non-repeating five-sided shapes that violated the known laws of crystallography (that is, until Roger Penrose in the 20th century found the secret).It is this geometry as well as the mathematical knowledge that pertains to it that we discover, if we lean in closer – in imagination or reality – to the surfaces of the walls and arches and pavements and ...”

“... Further, as Russell recalled in his autobiography, ‘I was thought wicked for saying that very young infants should not be punished for masturbation. A typical American witch hunt was instituted against me, and I became taboo throughout the whole of the United States.’ His planned lecture tour collapsed, and no magazine or newspaper would publish ...”

“... morning alter Virginia and Leonard had talked with her and tried to comfort her. In September 1934 Roger Fry died of a heart attack. These and other deaths affected her deeply, and her letters about them are movingly simple. To Carrington: ‘I find I cant write without suddenly thinking Oh but Lytton wont read this, and it takes all the point out of it. I ...”

“... the sad, remote father, the brothers, particularly Sande, and his wife Arloie, Reuben Kadish, Roger Wilcox, Rita Benton. They write with respect about Lee Krasner and without parti pris. My impression is that the book is written with justice. Many of their witnesses are still very much alive. The book – which in certain passages could be mistaken for a ...”

“... fronted by Freddie Bird, a well-respected face, who witnessed the current Mr Squires (a pre-Bond Roger Moore) doing a runner, before the bouncers moved in.Home’s praxis is the stuff of London: confrontation, violence, ‘the poetry of the inarticulate’. He was born on the southern fringes of Merton (close to the parklands once tended by the bucolic poet ...”

“... to a chic bar in order to catch a glimpse of the patron, the legendary Georges Carpentier. I saw young boys, in Saint Malo, flinging themselves into Boyhood of Raleigh postures as they saw the four masts of the late Alain Colas’s yacht appear on the distant horizon, and I heard it pass from lip to lip that Colas was back again. When his rival, Eric ...”

“... night and sexual behaviour of the Haredim, to whom apparently sexuality is a fearsome thing. Their young couples, who barely know each other, are kept in total sexual ignorance until their wedding day, when they are hurriedly briefed, a procedure which sometimes sends them into shock. The groom is instructed to close all blinds and curtains so that he will ...”

“... scrutiny by the sociologists, and Richard Hoggart was affirming in The Uses of Literacy that a young man like Potter is ‘cut off by his parents as much as by his talent which urges him to break away from his group’. Alienation was all the rage and Potter took on the role of outsider on the inside with relish. At Oxford he was a working-class ...”

“... 1962, he described a scene he had thought of including in North by Northwest (1959), but didn’t. Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) is on his way from New York to Chicago. Why not have him stop off at Detroit, then still in its Motor City heyday? I wanted to have a long dialogue scene between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers as they walk along the ...”

“... Inevitably, perhaps, these biographers often dress up speculations of their own as fact: that the young Wordsworth operated as a government spy, for instance, that Byron was a ruthless paedophile, or that Claire Clairmont in 1816 confessed that she had conceived a child by Shelley which he helped her to abort. For a variety of reasons, the life of Mary ...”

“... When​ I was young I thought poetry and poetry anthologies could change the world. ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads,’ Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun wrote, ‘he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ But nationality still mattered: Seamus Heaney’s reaction to his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry was ‘My passport’s green ...”

“... it will be born dead.”’Comyns was writing with hindsight about herself as a naive young woman who knew nothing about birth control. ‘I had a kind of idea if you controlled your mind and said “I won’t have any babies” very hard, they most likely wouldn’t come. I thought that was what was meant by birth control.’ But Sophia soon ...”

“... reaching up or lifting down a large book (invisible in this reproduction). Mack describes this young woman as pushing ‘up and away some sort of drapery or heavy curtain, almost as if she were engaged in an unveiling’. There is a certain oracular heightening here, reflected in Mack’s whole sense of the picture, as indeed perhaps in his image of Pope ...”

“... of his works. (A long-awaited life is in preparation by the leading Anglophone Cravaniste, Roger Lloyd Conover.) This lacuna is curious because although Cravan was Swiss by birth, and wrote exclusively in French, he was a mix of Irish and English by blood. I have long been fascinated by this hyperbolic but ultimately enigmatic figure, and not the least ...”