“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... felt great regret.Parrots are a recurring feature of early European voyages to the Americas. When Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean, he didn’t spot any livestock – ‘neither sheep nor goats nor any other beast’ – but he did see wild parrots and was given some tame ones as a gift. Shortly afterwards, during his first journey along coastal ...”

“... and a congregation that includes Geri Halliwell, Bear Grylls, the former John Lewis chair Sharon White and the multi-millionaire Conservative donor Ken Costa.HTB’s approach is rooted less in exegesis than in religious conviction. ‘Enthusiasm is a big part of it,’ according to the writer Andrew Graystone. ‘You believe that your brand of Christianity ...”

“... nor does it parade a ready-made metaphysic of gloom, like the novels of Graham Greene and Patrick White. It is not apocalyptic but dreadfully and intently domestic, like Dickens’s world of Todgers. It is divided into three parts: ‘A Head without a World’, ‘Headless World’ and ‘The World in the Head’. Kien, the hero, a recluse and a distinguished ...”

“... think of the Opera House as a superb example of Goethe’s frozen music; others imagine a beached white whale, a galleon sailing off to Elfland, nine ears cocked to hear some heavenly aria, nine nuns playing football. ‘A bunch of toenails clipped from a large albino dog’, the Sydney journalist Ron Saw once wrote. ‘It looks like something that crawled up ...”

“... had more or less impermeable walls and its contents were more or less homogeneous. Christopher Hann, discussing what he called the ‘Malinowski period’ of early field anthropology, in Social Anthropology (one of the volumes in the Teach Yourself series), underlined the emphasis laid by Malinowski and his disciples and students on the ...”

“... book’s bitterly ironic title distils her feelings about this period of inaction. It was Warren Christopher who called genocide ‘a problem from hell’, implying basically that butchery in the Balkans was a public relations fiasco for the Administration. Cynically or not, the West sat on its hands, refusing to undertake even relatively costless ...”