“... question means: he was tired. So I said yes and followed him to a room with two single beds. We lay down and it was odd to think of it, the two of us lying there, 45 years between us, the wind and rain howling outside the house and the beams creaking like the ones in an old ship. ‘What you thinking about?’ he said. ‘Moby Dick,’ I lied. ‘Me ...”

“... Kingsley Amis called Dylan Thomas’s life, the life told by Thomas’s first thorough biographer Paul Ferris, ‘a hilarious, shocking, sad story’. Thomas was very important to the Amis-Larkin club partly because he seemed determined not to be seen to be taking anything, including himself, too seriously. In 1941, Larkin refers to Thomas coming to the English Club at Oxford: ‘Hell of a fine man: little, snubby, hopelessly pissed bloke who made hundreds of cracks and read parodies of everybody in appropriate voices ...”

“... shows up in the profane, and vice versa: Like pictures, or like bookes gay coverings, made For lay men, are all women thus arayd, Themselves are mistique books, which only wee Whom their imputed grace will dignify Must see revealed. ‘Elegy VIII’As Christ justifies unworthy believers through his imputed grace, so a woman dignifies her unworthy lover by ...”

“... relations with Horkheimer’s Institute of Social Research – where so much of his future lay – and continued his secondary career as a writer on music. In the intellectual world of Weimar Germany, Frankfurt was Berlin’s sister city; and by 1928 Adorno had already made Berlin his second home. Musically, the presence of Schoenberg was a ...”

“... at the horizon. Venus shone a heatless planetary white among these parrot colours, and earth lay unregenerate so long that it seemed to me for once all these blandishments might fail. The birds of our world were black motes in that tropic. ‘It doesn’t seem to get any lighter,’ I said.    ‘It will,’ Lucille replied. The book’s ...”

“... Here she distinguished herself from her contemporaries: poets like Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer and Paul Blackburn often harked back to fraternal tropes of the knight, troubadour, jongleur. Never king. Guest’s origins were anything but kingly: born in North Carolina in 1920, she was shuffled around from town to town in Florida, where her father was an ...”

“... The overlapping vehicles aren’t heading the same way. Woolf, like Eliot (or for that matter like Paul Nash or Stanley Spencer, both brought in as supporting testimony), was by the late 1930s a middle-aged artist with a reputation to live up to, or live down: in each of these acts, a major dynamic had become internal dialogue. Piper by contrast remained as ...”

“... rows are just as useful for blocking out other people as intense sex. Lawrence was completing ‘Paul Morel’, the draft for Sons and Lovers, at the time, and his inability to lay his own mother to rest is surely behind some of his more vicious insults. In ‘She Looks Back’, Frieda’s salty tears of ‘horrid ...”

“... 1941 America First rally in Des Moines, maintained that the ‘greatest danger to this country’ lay in Jewish ‘ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government’. In its way, Urwand’s view of Hollywood is just as blinkered. The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, set up in the summer of 1936, is referred to only in ...”

“... to bury her here in this house of warrior-celibates, whose ranks William had formally joined as he lay dying at Caversham, saying goodbye to her and to his marriage with a tearful kiss. That separation in death was the story of her life, as for so many military wives: she has stayed at home in the Wye Valley, entombed at Marshal’s pious foundation of Tintern ...”

“... and Thomas Mann; Josef follows a similar track. Adler was pressed into slave labour to help lay a railway line between Prague and Brno, then he was sent to Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and two subcamps of Buchenwald, Niederorschel and Langenstein. He puts Josef through all of that except Theresienstadt, which is reserved for the second novel in the ...”

“... son, Nick Willing, she describes bringing each painting-in-progress to the room where Willing lay, and asking him what she should do with it. His edicts were, in her account, unwavering. ‘Paint it all out,’ he’d say of something she’d just painted in. ‘You’ve got some beautifully painted figures there, and you’ve got rubbish furniture behind ...”

“... approach is to clear space around her subject, to return to the source where she can, and to lay out the versions and parts. It’s as if someone has turned down the music and switched on the lights and now you can hear what everyone’s saying. The two books complement each other.The scenes Nico moved through were managed by men and it is largely men ...”

“... as exciting as we were led to believe. I’m thinking here particularly of a recent interview with Paul McCartney where he explained that when he and Mick smoked what he described charmingly as ‘pot’ together (after dinner, with a nice glass of wine apparently) all that happened was that they ‘discussed art’. I remember ’68, and let me assure ...”

“... of Olfactory Pleasure’, so one may expect few concessions to the hilarity that sometimes marks lay responses to disorderly ordure. Freud was unusual in devoting some attention to the relatively feeble olfactory powers of human beings, and philosophers, as Corbin remarks, have tended to ignore the sense of smell on the grounds that it has little to do with ...”