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“... Desmond’s larger politicising, cooperative work that includes The Politics of Evolution and the Moore-Desmond Darwin. Huxley didn’t drop his aspirates or hold the wrong fork: but timid Darwin had a deep assurance that brash Huxley could not simulate. The class difference between them might seem narrow for a historiographic contrast; but most of English ...”

“... head is charged with all your fighting blood. ‘I want to emphasise,’ she wrote to Marianne Moore, ‘the essential baseness of militarism’, and the poem is filled with images of questionable military might: Deep from protruding chests in green-gold medals dressed, planned to command and terrorise the rest The poems Bishop wrote between her arrival ...”

“... I am increasingly coming to think, of all the great modernist poets, of Pound and Eliot and Moore and Stevens?Most readers of the poems will have a pretty accurate sense of the life, though not one derived from the poems, which are quite unhelpful in that regard: Harvard; lawyer-poet; worked in insurance; wife and daughter; quiet life in ...”

“... and capricious’; New York, a ‘restless monster of possibility and liability’; Marianne Moore gave us ‘treasures of eccentricity and authenticity’. It’s an aural trick: if one thing sounds like another, their pairing seems right.Hardwick once admitted that she would read her work and ‘look for a line where I might insert a vivid phrase, or ...”

“... of the comment on Fielding and Hamidullah in A Passage to India: they regretted the death of Mrs Moore, ‘but they were middle-aged men, who had invested their emotions elsewhere, and outbursts of grief could not be expected from them over a slight acquaintance.’ Furbank, who of course knew the Merz story, deals with it in half a page, but Mrs Beauman, or ...”

“... origins, indeed the best. It is after all Bloomsbury (though whether in the person of G.E. Moore, E.M. Forster or the sainted Virginia herself I’m not sure), whose motto was ‘personal relations for ever and ever’, which, lolling about on the sun-baked lawns, these gorgeous creatures are indeed subscribing to (and possibly finding ...”

“... husband was calmer. George made this admission that she faked it in the early 1950s to Virginia Moore, who was researching her book The Unicorn: William Butler Yeats’s Search for Reality. Yeats remembered the first words as: ‘With the bird all is well at heart. Your action was right for both but in London you mistook its meaning.’ George remembered ...”

“... recurs, in Turgenev, in Samuel Butler, in Gosse. It is especially prominent in Ireland. George Moore, in his Confessions of a Young Man, blatantly proclaims his sense of liberation and relief when his father died. Synge makes an attempted parricide the theme of his Playboy of the Western World; James Joyce describes in Ulysses how Stephen ...”

“... today’s Rosenkavalier needs a signature. Huge crowds at the Abbey for the unveiling of the Oscar Wilde window, both transepts full with people standing (some on chairs) to catch a glimpse of the speakers. The most notable is of course the 90-year-old Gielgud, black overcoat, velvet collar, a half-smile always on his lips as of someone prepared to ...”

“... delight’, there is a voice in the wings whispering something not unlike what Auden said of Oscar Wilde – ‘Alone, he does not know who he is.’ The unanchored ‘you’ that often appears is Auden talking partly to himself and partly to another, a lover, a reader, an antagonist, uncertain about how close these shady characters can or should be ...”

“... sales, a letter from mother of stale news she’d already relayed over the phone, a card from Oscar Williams inviting us to a cocktail party in New York on the impossible last day of my classes. No news.’ In late 1959, waiting for short story acceptances that would not come, she wrote in her journal: ‘Must not wait for mail as it ruins the ...”

“... in the de Maistre studio-salon, I met other more or less important people, among them Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon, as well as Douglas Cooper … I got to know Francis when he designed some furniture for my Eccleston Street flat. I like to remember his beautiful pansy-shaped face, sometimes with too much lipstick on it … In those days ...”

“... thing. 31 December. Because some 25 years ago The Madness of King George was nominated for an Oscar, around Christmas we generally get a clutch of DVDs soliciting votes for the next year’s awards. Today it’s Call Me by Your Name, which has been much lauded, so much so that when we come to watch it this rather gets in the way. And it’s somehow all ...”