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“... art is by no means uniform. ‘Tear up and burn as much as possible,’ she said to her husband, John Middleton Murry, who, with his own publishing interests at heart and a sensibility that favoured a wife leaving a certain kind of literary legacy behind her, did nothing of the kind: so her output can sometimes look sketchy or inconsequential, sometimes ...”

“... while his long-suffering wife, Dorothy (they were married for 57 years), stayed at home. When Jane Russell, a family friend, and his co-star on two films including Macao – the film which prompted Howard Hughes to write a multi-page memo on the subject of her breasts – was asked to choose her favourite Mitchum film, she said: ‘I just like . . . Robert ...”

“... Smith Institute for the Criminally Insane, banging the same drum in the Independent. Not long ago John Bird and John Fortune did a sketch about the privatisation of air. These days it scarcely seems unthinkable. 28 February. There have been football riots in Bruges, where Chelsea have been playing, with, responsible for ...”

“... to the burning sun, which sends him blind. One other scene stands out. The hero, Harry Faversham (John Clements), fears he is a coward and having declined to go with his regiment to the Sudan goes native in order to prove himself by working unrecognised to assist his ex-colleagues who have sent him the feathers. To corroborate his disguise as a harmless ...”

“... of my childhood. 10 February. Finish with some regret Frances Spalding’s book on the Pipers, John and Myfanwy, the latter figuring in The Habit of Art where she is to some extent disparaged. I’ve always been in two minds about Piper, liking him when I was young with his paintings ‘modern’ but representational enough to be acceptable, a view I ...”

“... facilely grouped as a cetacean school of Great White Males (Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest Hemingway. Even those least influenced by Hemingway’s ...”

“... protective suavity, the counterfeit of impeccable logic or a minute calibration of fashion. John Berryman once said to a friend: ‘Doesn ‘t reading Stendhal make you feel intelligent!’ The same is true of Hazlitt; and the justified praise of Paulin’s book is that the compliment to our amour-propre survives his exploration to a generous ...”

“... though for me it spoils the ‘line’ of the poem – was reinstated at the petitioning of John Berryman in For the Union Dead (1964); a revised version of that is printed as a separate poem called ‘Ovid and Caesar’s Daughter’ in History (1973); and now Bidart and Gewanter have unearthed a seven-stanza monster that was printed in the Kenyon ...”

“... fervour also seems to me to come into play in the contrast between his distaste for John Ford and his love of Howard Hawks, perhaps the perfect no-brow. The clue to Hawks’s greatness is that this sombre lining is cut against the cloth of the genre in which he is operating. Far from the meek purveyor of Hollywood forms, he always chose to turn ...”

“... and fumes from coal (‘sea-coal’) burned in breweries, bakeries and glass foundries. John Evelyn’s Fumifugium, or, the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated (1661) dismissed the idea that domestic hearths had much to do with it – probably correctly at the time.Evelyn wrote about ‘Clowds of Smoak and Sulphur, so full of ...”

“... The date was 24 March 1847; the place was the home of a friend on Hill Street in Hannibal, where John Clemens had taken to his bed with a cold that developed into pneumonia. It was in that room, only minutes before his father’s final rattling breaths, that young Sam for the first time watched one member of his family kiss another. His dying father ‘put ...”

“... of ‘deference to the authority of Leibniz’, combined with a short-sighted mistrust of honest John Locke, might be responsible for the ‘striking contrast between the characteristical features of the continental philosophy . . . and those of contemporary systems which have succeeded each other in our own island’. By that time various posthumous ...”

“... intellectual tact is such/That it seems to feel truth, as one’s fingers do touch,’ while Mary Russell Mitford wrote of his theatre reviews: ‘I could not help reading them altogether; though so much of Hazlitt is rather dangerous to one’s taste, rather like dining on sweetmeats and supping on pickles. So poignant is he, and so rich, everything seems ...”

“... season, Coward belonged to the very last Victorian generation. There had been an older brother, Russell, who died a year earlier from meningitis, and a younger one, Eric, who was fated, like their father, to play a largely non-speaking part in the drama of Noël and Violet’s long and often troubled relationship. What Noël owed his father was his musical ...”

“... joining the company. But ‘Mrs K says defunutely: Nyet.’ The dance critics Arnold Haskell and John Martin denounced his ‘tragic’ mistake, his lamentable disloyalty. An article appeared in Izvestia under the name of Serge Lifar, the same Lifar who had awarded Nureyev the Nijinsky Prize: ‘He has become a star by sheer virtue of the fact that he is a ...”