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“... Even fruit could not escape his portentousness. He liked apples on account of their ‘snow-white meat and ruddy cover’, but it was ‘a metaphysical appetite, for I do not care for their taste’.Schwartz sometimes worried that his intellectualism was willed rather than authentic. In his autobiographical notes, he described ‘trying as before to ...”

“... centre left parties, originally coalitions between a now shrinking working class and a growing white-collar middle class, but now placing their hopes in what they saw as an expanding non-manual and entrepreneurial labour market.) Conservative centrism became increasingly unable to project a coherent vision of a good life and a good society to which all its ...”

“... know how to do it, not as bohemians but as characters in a fairy tale who might prefer to have a white marble fireplace than a bed to themselves. The apartment was on a pretty street in Greenwich Village, and that was important, but it was also below ground, had only one room and that barely big enough for a bed, a sofa and some chairs; there was no ...”

“... of the life of the mind, its comforts and delineations. The cat, female and probably white, is the secret sensuality of the ascetic life; not in the monastery garden, or out in the bog, but sitting in its proper, bounded place. Or the mat is Ireland itself, if this is not too much of a stretch, in the age of saints and scholars, that ...”

“... between Brown and Queen Victoria, the stories of the deathbed repentance of the queen’s chaplain Norman Macleod for having secretly married them, or of the queen being buried holding Brown’s photograph, with a lock of his hair, and wearing his mother’s wedding ring. There is no way of knowing the truth of any of this, but the more brazen use of Brown is ...”

“... herself employed in speaking with Virginia Moore and Ellmann,’ Saddlemyer writes. In 1961, when Norman Jeffares was writing his introduction to Yeats’s Selected Poems, she wrote to him: ‘I dislike your use of the word “Fake” . . . I told you this before & you had a happier phrasing in your book. However, I cannot ask you to alter this. The word ...”

“... each other. Birt’s first innovation was ‘producer choice’ (recommended by a Major government White Paper in 1992), which required BBC resource departments to charge producers the ‘real’ costs of their services, giving producers the complementary right to shop where they liked. This reform propelled cost-conscious producers into W.H. Smith, where ...”

“... upon the jury in its other roles and functions. The transplant operation was done in the White Paper ‘Criminal Justice’, Command Paper 9658. This commended the ‘powerful analysis’ of the Roskill Committee, and extended its recommendation that the defence’s right of peremptory challenge should be abolished in fraud trials to all jury ...”

“... as a symptom of oncoming dementia. The next day I went to see the Medical Officer, an elegant white-faced man, quite young, who had given up a successful practice as a dermatologist, and I confided to him my anxieties. In doing so, I must have embarrassed him. ‘Don’t worry, old boy,’ he said over and over again, as he led me to the door of his ...”

“... middle-class America. But neither ignores the political dimensions of their extraordinary story. Norman Cousins, the journalist who organised the Maidens’ expedition, was known as an anti-nuclear campaigner, and the US authorities didn’t initially like his project. Yet it became clear that the gesture might symbolise US friendship for Japan, and US ...”

“... discovery of the Romantic poets continues to be made. What Coleridge put in a notebook – the white dung of a hawk falling from the sky, the shadows cast on urine by candlelight – could and can go into poetry, along with the wasp trying to get out of the window, a menstrual problem, buying veal, what a husband thought the wife said, what she felt he ...”

“... figures have taken a swing at it, in one-offs or batches, including Pound, Beckett, Lowell and Norman Cameron. There have also been the thorough, proselytising translators, above all Wallace Fowlie, who wanted the whole oeuvre turned into English and the legend retold to Anglophone readers. And there was Edgell Rickword, in whom the two strands coincided ...”

“... thousands of books in his Kremlin apartment and at his dacha in Kuntsevo. There was émigré, White Guard literature, and there were works by old acquaintances whom he had killed: Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin. Their books, confiscated everywhere else in the country, lived on in his library. In the Khrushchev period the library was broken up, and ...”

“... projects by Colquhoun and Miller, one in Camden and another in Hackney, where an icy, high-style white-walled modernism, derived from the work of Adolf Loos and Giuseppe Terragni, somehow morphs into the typology of the London Victorian semi, for a clientele of Camden and Hackney council tenants. Today, NW1’s role has largely been supplanted by E1, and the ...”

“... straight writer to have a gay hero is still highly unusual. A fascinating essay in this context is Norman Mailer’s ‘The Homosexual as Villain’, commissioned by the gay magazine ONE in the 1950s. He’s pretty unsparing of his own past novelistic practice, saying that when he thought homosexuality was evil it made sense to dole it out to negative ...”