“... The setting in the crypt is unsympathetic – the gloomy ‘In’ and ‘Out’ corridors with green lino floors are no doubt necessary in the busy pilgrimage season – and I have anyway never had much of a thing for alleged holy relics. From the cathedral a pleasant auto-rickshaw ride through the old streets of Mylapore took me to Little Mount, a rocky ...”

“... because he is the least known of the writer-critics, and his French is often not straightforward. Robert Baldick, biographer of Huysmans (1955) and translator of his most famous novel, À Rebours, described his style as ‘one of the strangest literary idioms in existence’. Léon Bloy, a fellow writer and fellow Catholic, described it as ‘continually ...”

“... exciting half hour of my life, under those great vertical 15 second rivers of orange or blue or green lightning, & great skyfulls of blazing thorns, & continuous overhead thunder, with great long swells coming along the gunwales, pouring in on both sides, one man bailing like mad, the rest paddling & yelling, & our sail like a map of the world in giant rips ...”

“... of her first novel, Wise Blood. Her friend Sally Fitzgerald, the wife of the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald, broke the news, which effectively terminated all dreams of escaping Andalusia, the farm outside Milledgeville run by her mother. There O’Connor spent the last 12 years of her life, raising peacocks and writing ferocious stories populated by ...”

“... progressive activists. ‘Both parties do the same thing, one covertly, one overtly,’ he told a Green Party gathering in 2001. ‘Which one is going to get more people mad? Which one is going to get more people organised?’ The questions depend on a familiar leftist cliché – the worse things get, the better they get. But if Nader’s dismissal of the ...”

“... influenza. If he struck many of those who met him, from Alfred Jarry to Max Jacob to Picasso to Robert Delaunay, as larger than life, as the avant-garde spirit incarnate, and if his long poems, like those of Whitman and O’Hara, seem to expand and prolong themselves as effortlessly as amoebas in a petri dish, then beneath the shifting decors and personae a ...”

“... he had lived mostly in Greece. He still painted landscapes, but his work had none of the damp, green, memory-sodden melancholy of the English and Welsh valleys. The light in them was sharp, reflected off the Aegean; his palette in paintings such as Landscape, Hydra (1960-62) shimmers. The figures in these vivid landscapes were seldom single: they were ...”

“... of Lesley Dunn in 1981 (of which, curiously, only 21 are included here) have been compared by Robert Nye to the poems written by Thomas Hardy after the death of his wife, and by Jonathan Raban to In Memoriam. The subject is a precarious one for poetry, and Dunn has not always succeeded in avoiding the pitfalls. Poems like ‘Dining’ and ...”

“... young woman, wearing a permanently startled expression, and curiously finished off with a high green silk headdress, concealing her hair, so that it is not known whether she has any’. The style, perfected over decades, was part performance, part optical illusion. Sitwell’s passport recorded her height as five feet eleven but she was often reported as ...”

“... escapes through the roof of the burning building, and departs for New Zealand. In a prefatory note Robert Alan Jamieson calls his book ‘a yarn’, and if the yarn doesn’t read too convincingly it is perhaps because he is chiefly interested in other things: the face of external nature in Shetland, and the quality of life – narrow, enduring, heroic ...”

“... of Unionist voters as part of that overall vote. There is also an article by the No-campaigner Robert McCartney, a barrister and UK Unionist MP whom no one in Britain I know has ever heard of. Perhaps that’s because he’s kept the press on their guard with his proven readiness to sue for libel (there was a famous episode in Northern Ireland some years ...”

“... puppet, a half-animal creature, a faun, a character from the Commedia dell’Arte or even a Green boy in love with himself was much easier for him. He needed a mask.’ In some larger sense – in some way to do with desire and death at the Fin de Siècle – Nijinsky also appeared like a prophecy, a frightening conjuror with the energies of the ...”

“... was heavily revised in 1844) and the vivid anti-war poem Captain Sword and Captain Pen (1835). Robert Morrison’s volume on the piecemeal journalism of 1822-38 gives a very good sense of Hunt the critic, showing his extraordinary eye for new talent (the reviews of the young Carlyle, Browning and Tennyson are particularly insightful). Charles Mahoney’s ...”

“... The elongated shards of smog grey, pea green and lemonade that, since 1968, have cast a wan light on pews reserved for the use of MPs in St Margaret’s, Westminster, are untypical of John Piper. Normally, his stained glass seethes, particularly in Coventry Cathedral, where a Piper sunburst behind the boulder that serves as a font irradiates a great wall of clunky fenestration ...”

“... is dismayed to notice, when his thoughts turn to ending it all – in the style of Hart Crane or Robert Maxwell – that, wherever he jumps from, he will probably only find more superyacht beneath him. A woman’s hair may be ‘a sort of aureate beige’ or ‘dyed a maximal black’. Pleasures are technical, liquid and faddish; they are afforded by ...”