“... hadn’t liked it at all. In 1961, he was for a few weeks the most celebrated and the most reviled man in America. That year, Maris (who grew up in Fargo as Roger Maras but changed his name in 1955 to make it harder for opposing fans to come up with offensive rhyming chants) broke the most precious record in American sports, Babe Ruth’s mark of 60 home runs ...”

“... of Chet Baker & Crew, Pacific Records, 1956) wasn’t it ‘Existence precedes essence’? Or: ‘Man is condemned to be free’? Or (surely a contender for a TV quiz show clincher): ‘Hell is … other people!’? I fed the ‘famous dictum’ into Google and it was nowhere to be found (Weight supplies no attribution). Existentialism likewise gets a single ...”

“... is mainly interesting as a work of inadvertent autobiography, for the portrait it suggests of a man who really does seem to believe that ‘a world without elevator music would be much grimmer than its detractors ... could ever realise,’ a portrait animated as much by anger as by enthusiasm. Lanza the supernerd, the techno-freak, the fetishist of cultural ...”

“... 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 and holes, and those fish, unbelievable, their eyes glaring like orange torches – colour of the orange on traffic lights & just as bright, actually lit from the ...”

“... scenario which Martin Buber outlines in I and Thou as follows:This is the eternal source of art: a man is faced by a form which desires to be made through him into a work. This form is no offspring of his soul but is an appearance which steps up to it and demands of it the effective power. The man is concerned with an act of ...”

“... another memorable scene, Kit Carson’s wife tells Latour about Trinidad Lucero, a local man who may be the son of a priest in the area, Father Martinez. Lucero is also a member of the Penitentes, a Catholic brotherhood renowned for its intense rituals of mortification:Did you hear what happened to him at Abiquiu last year, in Passion Week? He tried ...”

“... not surprisingly – but as an unending nightmare. Not least among the reasons was that a black man of unerring self-discipline and caution, bipartisan to a fault, should have provoked such ferocious white resistance – fanned by the man who questioned the validity of his birth certificate and then succeeded him as ...”

“... was also a family friend with an eclectic record collection, and Eno fell especially hard for the Ray Conniff Singers and their ‘lush, soft, silky quality’. Muzak raptures! US cool entwined with European abstraction, brash spontaneity folded into systematic grids: everything here is a seed.Eno’s male relatives were happy tinkerers, bricoleurs, amateur ...”

“... acid at me. My chin was sore. The skin was grated off the palms of my hands. I started to run. A man and two women, all middle-aged, him in a light brown suede jacket, came running towards me. The women hollered: ‘Oh my God!’ The man bellowed: ‘Are you OK? Are you OK?’ ‘Yeah, yeah – I’m fine! Fine!’ I ...”

“... each other.Then the tender sign-off, ‘I think you are a neat cunt.’ It’s the gallantry of a man used to getting what he wants and who, having got it, extends a final flourish, wishing to leave no ill-will in case future opportunities – another spin in the Mazda – present themselves.It can’t be denied that Updike put all that fornication and ...”

“... the remnants of public anthems? The water is grey and blue, wide as an inlet of the sea. – A ray of white light, falling from high in the sky, obliterates this sham scene. If walking helped Rimbaud get a thought or a sequence into shape, it was not his only means of production. In 1873, during two stints at the family farm in the Ardennes – one before ...”

“... told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a rigid censorship to prevent anything like that ever happening again. This is presumably the origin of Larkin’s remark that before he died he fully expected to ...”

“... military service involved only a few weeks of training, but he remained technically an enlisted man, and could have been called up between 1812 and 1816. He worked irregularly in these years with fencing and hedging gangs engaged in enclosure. The Clares’ cottage had been divided, and they now had only two rooms. Clare’s father wasn’t well, and from ...”

“... There’s​ an old joke. ‘A man was choking to death in a restaurant and Barbra Streisand was sitting at the next table. She rushed over and did the Heimlich manoeuvre and saved his life. Next day the headline read: Barbra Streisand Takes the Food Right Out of a Person’s Mouth.’ Streisand repeats the joke in her autobiography, My Name Is Barbra, to explain why she felt a ‘certain kinship’ with Bill Clinton during his presidency ...”

“... keener than H.D., who wrote to a friend that Bryher loved her ‘so madly it is terrible. No man ever cared for me like that.’ She complained that Bryher had a brain where her heart should be and was ‘cold and imperious’: ‘Hard face, child face, how can you be so hard?’ But after H.D. became pregnant by Gray and both men deserted her, her ...”