“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the mid-18th century; but despite a lineage that included her aunt, Sarah Siddons, her father, Charles, and her uncle, the great tragedian John Philip Kemble, Fanny herself was deeply ambivalent towards the theatre. She first aspired to be a writer rather than an actress; and it was only when the family faced bankruptcy that the latest Kemble was swiftly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... over three thousand of them – he follows Franco ‘step by step and day by day’ in the hope of producing ‘a more accurate and convincing picture ... than has hitherto been current’. His book is all of that, and more; unless new sources of important information come to light, which seems unlikely given Preston’s exhaustive exploitation of the ...”

“... that had been made of atomic energy ... Some looked to biology with a mixture of diffidence and hope ... To hear one of the fathers of quantum mechanics ask himself, ‘What is life?’ and to describe heredity in terms of molecular structure, of inter-atomic bonds, of thermodynamic stability, sufficed to draw towards biology the enthusiasm of young ...”

“... to keep it a critic-free zone, won’t stretch far enough to shield it from scepticism. Your main hope of weatherproofing the enterprise lies in a new historical voiceover, deconstructing all previously received notions of Bloomsbury. Morphet submits some suggestions: he notes the continuities between Bell and Grant and the Victorian ‘Olympians’ they were ...”

“... who has aligned himself with Burroughs and Beckett, and was for years touted as the literary hope of British SF, this changing down of stylistic gear has a powerful surprise effect. Empire of the Sun is the most accessible and self-explanatory novel that Ballard has so far given us. Reviewers should not jump to critical conclusions. But I believe that ...”