“... have made more enemies in these two years than in ten years of editing the Cornhill. One man signed himself the other day “your justly incensed enemy” – because I had not asked him to write articles already assigned to others and he is not an extreme example of the antiquarian.’ As copy started to arrive, Stephen wailed over ‘the insane ...”

“... an essay by Eula Biss referring to Paul McCartney and ‘Norwegian Wood’; McCartney sporting a man bun during his lockdown vacation; rave reviews for McCartney’s new lockdown solo album; various reflections on the fiftieth anniversary of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass; various reflections on the fortieth anniversary of John Lennon’s death; a ...”

“... mild-mannered, imperturbable, sucking juice out of a Waffle House cup. He is a 50-year-old black man with a short moustache and a gap between his teeth. He was born in Pitt County but spent his happiest days in Atlanta. Terry sat at the counter of the Waffle House waiting for a decision. It turned out he needed more than Yolande to cover his shifts, so we ...”

“... a letter stops to talk – and what enables him to break the ice is that she is a woman doing a man’s job. 8 January. By train to Cambridge on a day of blinding sunshine and bitter cold. We eat our sandwiches on the train, a busy, bucketing electric job that scampers through Shepreth and Foxton and very different from the plodding little steam train I ...”

“... in my mind until ten weeks after the War had broken out. When it did recur to me it was as if a ray of light had struck a sensitised plate.’ In September 1914, very soon after the outbreak of war, Swinton was instructed by Kitchener, whom he had known in South Africa, to travel immediately to France as an official Eyewitness and write a series of reports ...”

“... by ‘the students and faculty’ of Harvard – and a juggernaut containing $15,000 worth of X-ray equipment, autoclaves, an operating table and a generator. By the end of the month, when the Republican government set its heart on the capture of Teruel, Neugass was part of a mobile AMB infirmary consisting of 17 vehicles. Neugass himself drove ‘a long ...”

“... was living. We know what he painted: in 1933, when he was 23, his Crucifixion that looks like an X-ray; eleven years later, the contortions of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. But what was going on in his mind is a matter for speculation. In October 1940, his asthma exacerbated by the dust from the bombing, he left London and moved to a ...”

“... Warhol wasn’t interested in the play, but he did want to cast Solanas in an erotic film, I, a Man. On the day she shot Warhol, Solanas rode the six floors with her victim in the elevator up to his office. ‘Solanas’s bullets,’ the Times reported, ‘punctured his stomach, liver, spleen, oesophagus and lungs. At one point, the doctors pronounced him ...”

“... of what would have happened had the time traveller not stepped on the butterfly: this is from Ray Bradbury’s immortal ‘Sound of Thunder’, but the idea is adaptable to any number of wistful daydreams – had Lincoln not been assassinated, or Bobby Kennedy – or more sombre fantasies, like Philip K. Dick’s Man in ...”

“... 1960s pop-rock before its larky brashness got lost in earnest philosophising. I see the young Ray Davies – an ambiguous girly-boy who hymned his cheap-suit backstreet bohemia over blackout power chords – as Smith’s John the Baptist. Horses betrays a love of early Kinks, Them, Who, but reframes their riffy aesthetic with studied artfulness. How much ...”

“... souls may fall, Strike through and make a lucid interval, But Shadwell’s genuine night admits no ray, His rising fogs prevail upon the day. Besides, his goodly fabric fills the eye, And seems designed for thoughtless majesty: Thoughtless as monarch oaks that shade the plain, And, spread in solemn state, supinely reign. On the one hand, the crescendo of ...”

“... many ways sharply characterised, with a formidable resource of observed contemporaneity – Media Man in motion. Yet, for all his TV hair-do’s, he, too, has an ancestry like that of Rhiannon and Malcolm; he is surely descended from the incorrigible Patrick of the earlier book who lamentably rapes the gentle Jenny instead of marrying her the first time ...”

“... first and last time anyone took over herself.’ Lilacs and dizziness, the sweeping element of a man. ‘Andado’ climaxes not with a defloration, but with what directly precedes it: They heard the river before they saw it, and then the clatter of Lautaro’s hooves on the wooden bridge. His ghastly shriek as the bridge gave way. They were both thrown from ...”

“... sort of political thought which sets aside questions about both the will of God and the nature of man and dreams of creating a new kind of human being. Simultaneously, the Romantic poets were showing what can happen when art is no longer thought of as imitation, but rather as self-creation. These poets made it plausible for art to claim the place in culture ...”

“... peasants’ – Mencken wrote approvingly in 1919 – and drew from it ‘the eternal tragedy of man’. Reviewing her early novels in the Nation, Carl Van Doren praised both her democratic outlook and ‘elemental’ vision of human suffering. ‘Passion blows through her chosen characters,’ he enthused, ‘like a free, wholesome, if devastating ...”