“... the world of business whether they want to or not, and the connection is eerily alive in Frank Sinatra’s version of ‘Mack the Knife’, where he sings of making an offer you can’t refuse. There is almost too much to unravel here. The song comes from (the English translation of) Brecht’s re-creation of Gay’s play, and has been separately ...”

“... Flaubert’s letters are in truth the best of their century in French, a wonderfully frank, powerful and animated compendium of his moods, his attitudes and his ideas concerning the practice of his art. Why would Proust go out of his way to condemn them, if not to warn his own posterity that a great writer may (or must?) write second-rate ...”

“... He drew the line, too, at Hitler’s 1936 speeches attacking the Bolsheviks and the Jews, telling Frank Dobo that even a ‘Jew-baiter’ like himself couldn’t ‘swallow such drivel’. What emerges from these half-serious and contradictory asides is a sense of Miller’s overwhelming political naivety. He seemed genuinely to think that his genius extended ...”

“... for the office, clearly knowing when he was licked. You couldn’t hope to out-dress old Frankie-Frank Spellman, one of the great bitch drag queens of this or any other age. Nobody should grudge the frumpish Hoover a fling or two, or indeed a flounce, though probably with his figure and complexion the stockings were a mistake. (Didn’t he have one kind ...”

“... or desire. There are few scenes more melancholy in 19th-century fiction, or in paintings such as Robert Braithwaite Martineau’s The Last Day in the Old Home, than the enforced sale of household goods. Thackeray made a specialism of clearance, in Vanity Fair and then again in The Newcomes; George Eliot followed suit, at length, in The Mill on the ...”

“... wet nurse and Croat housekeeper must have nourished what turned up in some of his later writing as frank Orientalism (‘Now I constantly see Dunja, beautiful, young, appearing in the oases, and the desert’). A happier influence on his work came from the French which was much spoken around him and whose poetry he discovered in the pages of the Mercure de ...”

“... is more’: ‘We know that less is not more. It is simply less!’ Mies was upset when Frank Lloyd Wright, whom he considered a friend, echoed the sentiment: ‘These Bauhaus architects ran from political totalitarianism in Germany to what is now made by specious promotion to seem their own totalitarianism in art here in America … Why do I ...”

“... declared, quoting Pasternak. 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 ...”

“... also a good deal of repetition. We are reminded four times of Blake’s maxim, almost as often of Robert Burton’s admittedly splendid description of tears as ‘excrementitious humours of the third concoction’. But Dixon’s instinct for connections and comparisons is unfailingly sharp and illuminating. He ranges effortlessly from Margery Kempe ...”

“... not the hider, who is doing the counting. ‘Doesn’t it annoy you a little,’ Bishop asked Robert Lowell, ‘when people hand you back, like an obligation, flat statements of what you “meant”?’ Colm Tóibín avoids this temptation. On Elizabeth Bishop is an engaging introduction to her life and work, and also an essay on the importance of her ...”

“... the medical philosophy of AA are primitive but serviceable. The movement was largely inspired by Frank Buchman’s Oxford Group (the same movement that gave us Moral Rearmament and Mrs Whitehouse), and true to its enthusiastic origins, it believes in the regenerating effect of a ‘total’ confession of sin and inadequacy: ‘We admitted we were powerless ...”

“... the Memoirs as a remarkable hybrid: as innovatively mock heroic as the Dunciad; as winningly frank and ramblingly anecdotal as the autobiography of her patron, the comic actor and poet laureate Colley Cibber; as dizzying in its inversion of perspective as Gulliver’s Travels; and as sentimental as the novels of Samuel Richardson, a patron for whom ...”

“... divisions were heightened by growing militancy in the trade union movement, particularly when Frank Cousins became leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union in 1956. At the TUC Congress that year Cousins rejected government calls for wage restraint and told delegates: ‘In a period of freedom for all, we are part of the all.’ Whereas ...”

“... It ran for four issues and included the founders’ work alongside that of Barbara Guest, Frank O’Hara, Edwin Denby and others. Locus Solus was like the intersection of New York, Paris and a Surrealist Arcady.Mathews credited Roussel with showing him that prose could be generated under similar constraints to those that apply to poetry, a discovery ...”

“... towns – an example, Goebbels said, of ‘England’s assassination of European culture’. Hans Frank, governor general of Nazi-occupied Poland, said his aim was ‘to elevate the Polish people to the honour of European civilisation’, even as he trashed and looted the vast art collections of the Polish aristocracy, banned performances of Chopin and sent ...”