“... thoughts came to me as I sat in the second row at the ICA on an uncommonly warm October midday, so close to the leather-jacketed, blue-jeaned rock idol (the ‘love child of Bob Dylan and James Brown’, as Jon Stewart joked) that we could almost have fist-bumped. To get this close, we journos had to bring specific photo ID ...”

“... editions of all her books soon followed.After Pym died in 1980, her sister, Hilary, and Pym’s close friend and colleague Hazel Holt, put together an ‘autobiography’ from her letters and diaries: A Very Private Eye (1984). Holt’s biography proper was published in 1990. She was lavish with quotation, relying on Pym’s endlessly entertaining voice to ...”

“... Old Church Slavonic or translating Rimbaud. Meanwhile, pioneering scholars like Barbara Tuchman, Frank Manuel and George Whalley mined gold year after year from the lodes of ore in the libraries.The roots of this bookish postwar New York, as Denise Gigante shows in Book Madness, stretched back deep into the 19th century. Some of them also nourished ...”

“... written to a correspondent who had theories of his own. ‘Dear Mr Riches,’ the letter says, Frank Greene, one of my nephews, was with us the other day and I told him of our discussion about ‘Will of the Mill’. He at once, without any hesitation, announced that he agreed with your reading of it. He was not content with announcing his own opinion, but ...”

“... and then suddenly it was all too much. I felt for them, I really did. To have come so very, very close. But perhaps it was too much to expect. In any case, it was not to be. The irony was that it wasn’t Brazil’s third goal that caused it to happen, but the replay. The Ghana defenders pushed up, the Brazilian midfield advanced towards them, the pass was ...”

“... up to the election of 1860 (won by Abraham Lincoln) or 1932 (Franklin D. Roosevelt), but it’s close. The election marked the end of the liberal ascendancy that started with the New Deal and of the electoral politics that saw no Republican president but Eisenhower in the White House for more than three decades (even he was elected only after accepting the ...”

“... Vietnamese wife and spoke the language fluently. While serving as a PoW interrogator, he formed a close relationship with Le Van Hiet, his detachment’s interpreter. One day in January 1967, in the midst of Operation Cedar Falls in the Iron Triangle area north of Saigon, Le came to him ashen and in tears, muttering that two captains from an armoured cavalry ...”

“... R. Guggenheim Museum of Non-Objective Art) opened in 1939 and was given new prominence in 1959 by Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous building. Then came the Hirshhorn in Washington DC in 1974. Across the Mall, the National Gallery of Art was watching and I.M. Pei was commissioned to create the East Building, which opened in 1978. The East Building was not at ...”

“... Nearly all the young poets of the age strove for formal competence: Lowell, Merwin, Plath and even Frank O’Hara wrote reams of quatrains and sonnets before breaking out into free verse, seemingly all at once, as if to the Muses’ baton. During his tenure as judge of the Yale Younger Poets prize, Auden was frequently unenthused; in 1947, he awarded it to his ...”

“... could well meet. Around this time Mann attended a public reading given by his friend Bruno Frank. He liked the writing and the performance but was struck by the fact that Frank used seriously the ‘humanistic’ narrative style that he himself could use only ironically. ‘Stylistically,’ he wrote in his ...”

“... margins of the texts – but what of passages like this, when he describes going up to Cambridge?Frank-hearted maids of rocky Cumberland,You and your not unwelcome days of mirthI quitted, and your nights of revelry,And in my own unlovely cell sate downIn lightsome mood.This Wordsworth is lordly and set apart, perhaps mock-heroically self-aggrandising (or so ...”

“... had installed itself in the KPD headquarters, now conveniently vacant. Liddell was assisted by Frank Foley, MI6’s Berlin station chief, whose diplomatic cover was passport control officer. On 31 March, the two men entered Karl Liebknecht Haus, now renamed Horst Wessel Haus and sporting a huge swastika where only weeks earlier Lenin had stared out from a ...”

“... is disappointed in her would be enough to make up my mind. 6 March. A young man passes wearing a close-fitting leather cap meant to strap under the chin, the strap unfastened and dangling loose. He looks like 1. a racing driver at Brooklands in the 1930s; 2. someone out of Brueghel about to torment Christ. Neither, I would have thought, is the look he is ...”

“... bourgeois or worse. It must have been rather as if Ivan Karamazov had suddenly materialised in the close at Barchester. No doubt Wittgenstein’s father, Karl, an Austrian steel magnate, bore some responsibility for the relentless soul-searching, the sense of sin and the pervasive unhappiness that beset his youngest son – and indeed nearly all his sons, for ...”

“... in ‘an extravagant, eye-catching green robe, bought for him, in Tunis she thought, by his Aunt Frank on his first transatlantic trip’. Elective affinity was everything. As Williams said of Pound: ‘It took just one look and I knew it was it.’ Their relationship had a note of comedy in it: ‘He was impressed with his own poetry,’ Williams ...”