“... artists or writers, as ‘Cash that bloody cheque – for God’s sake, I don’t need it.’ James Knowlson’s biography reports that when his painter friend Henri Hayden was hospitalised in 1962 he looked after the Haydens’ tax bills as well as their rent. Beckett was, in other words, beginning to resemble the otherworldly, saintly figure of later ...”

“... the same passport round here. There were forty to fifty people. Seven hundred cheered a drunken [James] Dickey some months before. I didn’t go to the reception.McGahern was amused by many things and people. There was no telephone in the house in Leitrim on my first visit (‘I’m uneasy on the phone,’ he wrote in 1998. ‘I think it comes from having to ...”

“... but for constantly falling down’. He remembers smoking pot with his mother and her new partner, Joyce, and watching them cry and stroke each other’s hair as they talked about their childhoods. He remembers thinking his father was one of a generation of men who were born to fill out a suit – but he himself was a ‘wastoid’, a nihilist; cycling in and ...”

“... him inevitable that he should behave as a member of its established church. He was married in St James’s, Piccadilly, and sometimes he accompanied me to church. How deep this went was not a question that either of us was disposed to pursue, though for different reasons: I because, though, when I went away to school, I encountered boys who were Jews by ...”

“... figures who were coming to be recognised as the leading European Modernists – Proust, Eliot and Joyce. The literature on Wilson repeats several slightly different versions of his remark that (as Dabney reports it) he ‘was never happier than when telling people about a work they were unfamiliar with in a language they didn’t know’. This is certainly ...”

“... of the innumerable riffs in Stein which show off her love of discriminations – as though Henry James’s intelligence has acquired a manic style – but it’s also a demonstration of an unstated theory. According to this theory, all artistic work needs to be placed within its properly domestic sphere. ‘I began with Fernande and then there were Madame ...”

“... the period’s wealthiest author. In comparison, the circumstances of the very set-up indeed James Merrill (like Roussel an addicted poetic formalist), driving his own Volkswagen and using a homemade Ouija board all those years, seem positively peasant-like and self-reliant. Alison Lurie recently described Merrill in Connecticut, chatting in his kitchen ...”

“... the classroom the day Mrs Wallace said it to me, a snow-scene dense enough to make the end of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ appear like a moment’s inclemency. The poet Hugh MacDiarmid had a feeling for the freezing lives of sheep, and he resurrected, or to some extent invented, the words that would capture the rude nature of the Scottish snowstorm, calling ...”

“... meals proceeded from kitchen to dining room by miniature railway, they owned a London house in St James’s Square, a Highland estate on the island of Jura, and a 16-bedroom seaside ‘cottage’ at Sandwich in Kent. Waldorf and Nancy Astor and their five children somehow found the time to live in all four; worried about the safety of Jura milk, Nancy had her ...”

“... in Walmer Road while Tilbury and PC Dave Pullan went to another temporary relief centre, Clement James in Treadgold Street. ‘Because we were in uniform,’ Rumble said, ‘we were seen as authority figures, but people wouldn’t have perceived us as having anything to do with the council. But we are council. I was inside the cordon and my team were there ...”