“... the Love Child of Camilla Parker-Bowles and Wayne Rooney. She who every morning plays a gallant Robert Browning to my late-rising, half-paralytic Elizabeth Barrett – get thee up from thy bed, thou fat lazy kitten-slug, and take that nun’s twat off thy head. Here, I’ve bought thee a clip-on pedometer and thou wilt walk ten thousand steps up and down ...”

“... entered the federal prison on McNeil Island in Puget Sound, where he discovered Scientology, read Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, and first heard the Beatles. From Scientology, he took ideas that he would combine with Carnegie’s: let the other fellow think he was an immortal spiritual being; exploit his traumatic ...”

“... the Little Capacon River. My friend was saying that a lot of the American poets right now, like Robert Hass, the Poet Laureate, are not actually writing poetry at all: ‘they’re involved in a warding off of the poetic moment,’ he said, ‘they see that they have something in their hand, then they talk it away.’ The road was winding and narrow, and we ...”

“... the Prisoner of Chillon tells us, ‘no feeling – none –/Among the stones I stood a stone’). In his storytelling, Byron likes both to withhold information and provide too much of it, sometimes contriving ambiguity for ambiguity’s sake. In The Giaour, one character’s ‘swarthy visage spake distress’ – ‘but,’ Byron adds, ‘this ...”

“... decades car fumes altered the college façades, making them dark and gothic rather than honeyed stone. The cars needed more roads, the workers who built the cars needed places to live, and Betjeman feared the class politics all this entailed: as the factory grew, workers from across the country moved in, notably from South Wales, where they were politically ...”

“... of his country in the aftermath of the Nicaraguan earthquake. Winding it up came a warning from Robert Bork against the menace of the ‘clerisy of power’ now (under the Ford Presidency) steering the nation towards the shoals of equality and uniformity. The following bumper issue of the National Review, on 5 December, was mainly taken up with the text of ...”

“... for London’s waste. There isn’t much romance in an ordinary boat being rammed, sinking like a stone – with no time for heroism or cowardice or stories of any sort – and leaving survivors bobbing for a few minutes in shit. The Titanic and her sister ships, on the other hand, were the crowning glory of the century of progress. A White Star Line poster ...”

“... Duse ‘almost concealed’ it: ‘She takes her great anguish and lays it in a tomb and rolls a stone before the door.’ Cather gravitated towards Duse, Acocella suggests, because the Italian actress’s understated style came closest to expressing Cather’s own evolving impulse as a novelist: to convey meaning subtly, through oblique hints and ...”

“... both of whom died before she was nineteen. She had one child, John, with her first partner; two, Robert and Shannon, with her second; and two more, Chloe and William, with her third. By the time William was born, Christine had endured beatings, depression and at least one suicide attempt. She drank heavily and abused amphetamines.William was placed on the ...”

“... and uneasily, as ‘beautiful’.Lynch decided to become a painter after reading The Art Spirit by Robert Henri (Edward Hopper’s teacher), which convinced him that ‘the art life’ was the ideal form of American self-expression. This conviction carried him to art schools in Washington DC, Boston and Philadelphia, and briefly to Europe, on a failed odyssey ...”

“... to the power of editors. After reading Sidney Colvin’s edition of the letters of his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, he wrote: ‘One has the vague sense of omissions and truncations – one smells the thing unprinted.’ In the years after James’s death, his family in the United States was concerned about his reputation, especially about what Edel ...”

“... subsequent books had been well received, but it was North that really established him: it prompted Robert Lowell to declare him the best Irish poet since Yeats, and he was widely celebrated by the London reviewers, who seemed on the whole untroubled by the suggestion that the Irish might be constitutionally disposed to killing one another. Heaney didn’t ...”

“... genius seems to have been first sparked by reading a good though now mostly forgotten book, Robert Currie’s Genius (1974), which analysed with panache the Romantic invention of the phenomenon and its diverse aftermath in 20th-century avatars such as Samuel Beckett and Adolf Hitler. The lonely artist inhabits a superior aesthetic realm, Currie ...”

“... for the novels of J.M. Barrie and Arthur Ransome, for Emil and the Detectives and The Sword in the Stone. And he was much pre-occupied with writing a string quartet about his schooldays, with movements given titles like ‘P.T.’ and ‘Ragging’. His emotional life centred on his mother. Mrs Britten – ‘darling mummy ... angel of my heart’ – was ...”

“... buildings in Edinburgh and Glasgow, you want to ask: where did all that wealth go? Looking at the stone ruins in the bracken of Lowland and Highland hills, you want to ask: where did all those people go – and why? These are questions rooted in the history of the British Empire, and they concern the very distinct and remarkable and sometimes shocking part ...”