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“... then, another biography? Joan Hardwick, author of An Immodest Violet (1990), a study of Violet Hunt (whose novels included – yes – The Tiger Skin), evidently felt irresistibly drawn to another immodest adventuress of the period. She is a writer who can keep a straight face when trafficking in absurdity, though she throws in an occasional exclamation ...”

“... face he meets’. This is what the metropolitan insomniac does instead of counting sheep. For J. Alfred Prufrock, faces are masks – ‘there will be time/To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’ – and in The Waste Land these masks can’t be looked straight in the eye: ‘each man fixed his eyes before his feet./Flowed up the hill and down ...”

“... ought to net fame and fortune for the discoverer. This was also the ideology enshrined in Alfred Nobel’s 1895 testament: prizes in physics were to be awarded for ‘the most important discovery or invention’, not for theoretical advances. Einstein officially won the 1921 prize ‘for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his ...”

“... creative discourse. The central character – through whose viewpoint the narrative unfolds – is Alfred Ludens, a reader in history, on sabbatical from an unnamed London University college. Gildas Herne (the first speaker) is a musician and ex-priest. He represents the weak magnetic force which holds the group together; the novel begins and ends with the ...”

“... in 1929 MoMA has always been as educative in mission as elitist in tone. Its first director, Alfred Barr, spread the gospel of Modernist art as generously and clearly as he could, given the different limitations of trustees and viewers. Rubin narrowed the story but strengthened the argument, and some of his shows were provocative dissertations on the ...”

“... pleasure in every phase of their more ghastly homicides; from the moment a corpse was found the hunt for morbid thrills was intense. After seven members of the Marshall family were hacked to death at Denham in 1870, ‘pleasure vans’ brought hordes of day-trippers from London to see the gore, and to purloin souvenirs. The Victorians were not dainty in ...”

“... blowing free – aaahhhh! – as a streaming landscape rushes deliriously past. The pataphysician Alfred Jarry was so excited by the close-fitting kit that, before the First War, he took to dressing in the uniform of a cycle racer. He caused a scandal by following Mallarmé’s funeral cortège on his bicycle. Jarry’s provocative text ‘The Crucifixion ...”

“... signals of homoeroticism. If the ‘you’ of the opening line of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (‘Let us go then, you and I’) is male, as Eliot once conceded in a letter to a Norwegian academic, then surely so is the ‘you’ with whom Prufrock shares a languorous afternoon. And those lines from Dante with which Eliot paid tribute to ...”

“... back to England to sell his work and to sustain relationships that remained important to him (with Alfred and Emily Tennyson, and with the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt, whom he would call ‘daddy’). Lear’s travel journals and letters are full of observations that could have made it into nonsense ...”

“... of children’s rhyme and fairy-tales. Here are the poems one grew up on, or imagines one did: Alfred Noyes’s ‘The Highwayman’, Poe’s ‘The Raven’, Kipling’s ‘East and West’. And here are the texts one’s governess would have liked, had one had a governess: Auden’s ‘Ballad of Barnaby’, about a tumbler coming to God, Longfellow’s ...”

“... three years earlier, and the two had formed an immediate but gradually cooling friendship. Leigh Hunt and his family were conveniently near (too conveniently, the Carlyles soon decided). They became friendly with John Sterling and with Harriet Martineau. They would come to know Giuseppe Mazzini, Geraldine Jewsbury, John ...”

“... and seaside holidays. And they became the conduit for advertising on a huge scale: a print by Alfred Concanen from 1874 shows passengers and trains in a large, busy station dwarfed by posters twenty feet across covering the wall of the train shed, promoting the virtues of Lamplough’s Pyretic Saline and Crosby’s Balsamic Cough Elixir. The best way ...”

“... there, but nobody noticed that, after primary school, Ronnie Pinn was there too, until 1980. In my hunt for the real Ronnie, I thought several times that I saw him in grainy photos posted by ex-pupils on Friends Reunited. Was he not the boy in the white shirt at the edge of a photograph taken in front of the school in 1980, with kids tumbling over each other ...”

“... use ballistic/prosthetic devices to hurl soggy yellow-green tennis balls for their hunt-and-retrieve pets. And the stoic Chinese couple, accomplishing their own version of the Long March, scorch rubber treadmarks around the padlocked novelty of the pristine football pitches. Artificial grass is better than the real thing, tougher, each blade ...”

“... in an obscure corner of Afghanistan, except in so far as the local bigwigs might help them hunt down al-Qaida. The small contingent of US special forces based in Helmand between 2001 and 2006 didn’t mean to poison the well for their successors, but that was what they, together with the mujahedin commanders, did. The commanders used the Americans to ...”