“... spartan, blame the Bursar but then, the point of Parnassus was never the upholstery. Besides the hope is that undergraduates will find their way up the stairs to sit not in the chairs but at these famous feet. But remember, we are not asking the great man to do. His doing after all is mostly done. No. We are asking him to be. Count the poet’s presence here ...”

“... there were other ideas outside the West and its academies. Yet Coleman was enough of a utopian to hope that the diversity of the world’s musics would eventually achieve a higher unity: a day of non-judgment, when ‘the categories of sound will not involve any race but just the sound itself.’ That he spoke of ‘sound’, rather than ‘music’ or ...”

“... power, superiority, pre-eminence or authority ecclesiastical or spiritual within this realm’? Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph and Margaret Thatcher’s official biographer, turned his fire on the archbishop of Canterbury: ‘I do feel that the archbishop, when looking at Brexit, should remember the Act in Restraint of Appeals. After ...”

“... The person who most encouraged him to ‘meditate upon himself’ was the straight poet Charles Olson. Wieners first encountered Olson at a reading on the night of Hurricane Hazel in 1954. Olson offered him a loan for tuition, room and board at Black Mountain College, and Wieners studied there in 1955 and 1956. After this, he recommended Olson’s ...”

“... starts by announcing his subject’s date of birth; unlike most biographers, he gets it wrong. Charles Henry Maxwell Knight was born on 9 July 1900, not 4 September, under the sign of Cancer, not Virgo, however tempting it may be, for reasons which become clear in the course of the story, to assign him to the latter. Information about Maxwell Knight is ...”

“... listed by Cesare Ripa in his Iconologia of 1593: Docility, Chastity, Benevolence, Hope, Magnanimity, Health, Spendour, Clemency, Moderation, Fidelity, Assiduity, Tranquillity, Inclination, Divine Grace, Contrition, Severity, Scandal, Amorous Contentment, Simulation, Generosity, Pertinacity, Bliss. That the appearance of a figure ever conveyed ...”

“... to rebut the Anglican smear that they were king killers, that Presbyterian disloyalty had brought Charles I to the block. On the other, Presbyterians – being solidly Whig – dissociated themselves from the divine right principles of non-resistance and passive obedience inculcated by High Church Anglican Tories. Some Presbyterians, including Castlereagh’s ...”

“... become a patron of Oriental learning, overseeing important translations of works on Hindu law and Charles Wilkins’s pioneering translation of the Bhagavad-Gita. When Sir William Jones, the inspirational instigator of Indo-European studies, arrived in Bengal as a judge, Hastings was one of his strongest supporters. Though it has long been fashionable to ...”

“... underway, using the same detective I used in this book, but not using him so violently. I hope to finish that this month. The first serial rights have been sold to the Black Mask.’ Hammett wasn’t quite coming clean: The Dain Curse isn’t a book-length detective story, but three pulp stories loosely tied together, with the same ...”

“... his books in preparation for their move to a sumptuous new building, constructed by the architect Charles McKim, on 36th Street and Madison Avenue. Within a few years, Greene was all but in charge, not only of the library but of all Morgan’s acquisitions for it. ‘Miss Belle Greene can spend more money in an afternoon than any other young woman of ...”

“... Forster’s ‘repudiation of our white bunk is genuine, sincere, and pretty thorough ... King Charles must have his head off. Homage to the headsman.’ It’s too often the case that the dark burnings of the most impassioned artist are rewarded primarily by the pale fire of scholarship, and Lawrence’s weighty, three-volume treatment by the Cambridge ...”

“... a rough outline of The Great Gatsby in the back of a copy of André Malraux’s novel Man’s Hope – nine entries for the nine chapters of the book, which Churchwell adopts for the same purpose. ‘I, Glamour of Rumsies and Hitchcoks’ is Churchwell’s chapter 1; ‘Ash Heaps. Memory of 125th. Gt. Neck’ is chapter 2; and so on. Fitzgerald was a ...”

“... obliged us to look again at that decade and treat it on its own terms as a time of achievement and hope. The world did eventually recover economically from the war and by the late 1920s production in most European countries had reached prewar levels. True, the US had failed to join the League of Nations, which Woodrow Wilson had nearly killed himself trying to ...”

“... Essex. 7. 1828, month unknown. Shot at Holme-on-Spalding-Moor, Yorkshire, by the keeper of Lord Charles Stourton. 8. 1840, month unknown. Caught in a state of exhaustion near Marshchapel in North Lincolnshire. 9. 1841, 21 December. Shot at Margate, Kent, by a boy ‘employed in keeping crows’; sold to a dealer for fourpence, then exhibited in Margate ...”

“... breakaway state of Katanga in the Congo against the UN, and it strongly supported Biafra in the hope of breaking up Nigeria, the dominant Anglophone state in West Africa. Sometimes this almost led to open clashes between the powers. In 1964 a coup against Leon M’ba in Gabon was blamed on the CIA; when French troops intervened to reinstate M’ba, American ...”