“... 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 ...”

“... Luis Alvarez​ gets only a bit part in Christopher Nolan’s movie Oppenheimer. In January 1939, the news arrives in Berkeley that two German scientists have split the uranium atom. Oppenheimer, who hasn’t yet heard, sees an excited Alvarez dashing out of a barber shop mid-haircut, newspaper in hand. He catches up with him at the physics department, where they’re joined by E ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... beStill the indomitable Irishry.Yeats died on 28 January 1939. Two days earlier, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood had arrived in New York. When Auden heard of Yeats’s death, he sought to ascertain what time of the day or night he had died. He was planning a poem. What preoccupied him most in 1939 was guilt that his gift for poetry was serving ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in D’Olier Street while he presented himself indecently to the instrument in the callbox’. In Christopher Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935), the homosexual Baron Kuno von Pregnitz, pursued by the police on charges of political corruption, locks himself in panic into a cubicle in a public lavatory. Next day, the newspapers uniformly report him ...”

“... that ever walks attended By a strong siding champion Conscience. – O welcom pure-ey’d Faith, white-handed Hope, Thou hovering Angel girt with golden wings, And thou unblemish’t form of Chastity. ‘Calling shapes’ and ‘beckning shadows dire’ – those ultra-Miltonic participles become disembodied moral threats on the edges of the Lady’s ...”

“... of the time. The real disaster came when he entered King’s School, Canterbury (alma mater of Christopher Marlowe, Somerset Maugham, Patrick Leigh-Fermor), from which Brooke ran away in the first week. He was sent back. The second week he ran away again. The second withdrawal marked the termination of his residence there, which had lasted less than a ...”