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“... in Santa Monica through which an entire Who’s Who of the anti-fascist migration was to pass. Christopher Isherwood lived above the garage. Equally impressive was the tireless support Viertel gave to the many other, less glamorous, European refugees who washed up in LA. Having appeared in the opening scene of the German-language version of Anna ...”

“... insupportable.’ This was in 1808, when Wordsworth had been offered 100 guineas to publish The White Doe of Rylstone. To the horror of his wife and sister – he was particularly hard up at the time – he began to back away from the deal, hating the thought of submitting his work to Longman’s ‘criticasters’. Luckily for the family ...”

“... arches, a scarfed and hatted Fagin surrounded by smooth-cheeked, bare-headed acolytes – Tony White, Stewart Home, Steve Aylett, Steve Beard, China Miéville. What you are getting is a frame from Moorcock’s comic strip, The Metatemporal Detective, showing a traditional ‘hell’s kitchen’ where ‘Old Man Smith’, the piratical ruler of the ...”

“... in Florence is evoked in all its profusion, its ‘odds and ends of ravage’: picture-frames White through the worn gilt, mirror-sconces chipped, Bronze angel-heads once knobs attached to chests, (Handled when ancient dames chose forth brocade) Modern chalk drawings, studies from the nude, Samples of stone, jet, breccia, porphyry Polished and ...”

“... board under Perry Anderson. While their elders on the left – the generation of E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill – had planted radical politics in the soil of English history, the new cohort had more cosmopolitan ambitions. They looked abroad, especially to the Continent and the likes of Lukács, Gramsci and Althusser, for remedies against what they saw ...”

“... pas de téléphone.’ In England his friends included Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Henry Moore and Christopher Wood. He never met the self-taught Cornish painter Alfred Wallis but supported him and bought his work. It was at the Edes’ dinner table that Moore and Barbara Hepworth had their famous argument about which of them was the first to put a hole in a ...”

“... embankment of the M8 while Keir climbs on top of her friend. To prepare him Keir spits ‘a foamy white gobful’ onto a much chewed comb and uses it to give him a centre parting. Shuggie’s first reaction is to recoil. This is very different from the way he is used to encountering the saliva of others, not charged with contempt but promoted to the status of ...”

“... prosecution service did fax over a letter identifying him as a suicide risk. The prison officer, Christopher McAinsh, and mental health nurse, Brian Leitch, who carried out his reception risk assessment recorded some (but not all) of the information in these documents, and noted that William was ‘very nervous about his time in jail’. They put him on ...”

“... canon. For Q.D. Leavis – no friend of multiracial Britain – his prose was implicitly ‘white’, because it draws ‘on the accumulated associations of a race’. But as most proselytising was done by African evangelists, rather than white missionaries in Africa, the text became rooted in the continent, often ...”

“... of the poets – Charles Tomlinson, or David Gascoyne, or Robert Conquest, or John Holloway, or Christopher Middleton, or Geoffrey Hill – stood for a world that was fully England. Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished glass of a posh window in some imaginary Big House. But it was clear to me that ...”

“... Armstrong was declaring the song too stupid for words? Does this constitute cultural criticism of (white) Tin Pan Alley’s hold on America? This surely can be said of Waller’s singing, though it wasn’t what he set out to do as a serious youngster devoted to the piano, classical as well as jazz.Thomas ‘Fats’ Waller – ‘Tom’ or ‘Thomas’ to his ...”

“... Vauxhall. When he turned to me, I noticed how mottled the irises of his eyes were, how patches of white and light grey jostled for space on them in such a way as to give him a look of shock and bewilderment. He wore one of the longest coats I’ve ever seen; it went all the way down, ending on top of a yellowish pair of sandshoes. His face was full of ...”

“... publishing, Clive James on the jazz criticism as well as the poems, Alan Brownjohn on the novels, Christopher Ricks on Larkin’s poetic style and structure, Seamus Heaney on his idealism, and others. But in this too, oddly enough, one can fail to find Larkin: because the desire to make tribute tends to move the stress towards the more public, more social ...”

“... when they invoked his right to publish a book that could elicit a plausible charge of blasphemy. Christopher Hitchens spoke early and courageously on those lines. ‘Behind the use of bleating words like “offensive”,’ he wrote in his Nation column on 13 March 1989, ‘one can sense abject trahison: the ecumenicism of the philistines’; as for ...”

“... tales in 1977 and had been working on her own remixes of Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood. The tales collected in The Bloody Chamber (1979) were succinct and elegant and exquisitely put together, glinting with fresh ideas about cruelty and sexuality and desire and wildness; they also contain some of the most sensuous ...”