“... is happening here beyond fleshed-out testimony; the narrative rings true, but not as fiction.In ‘Green Sealing Wax’, also a ‘true story from childhood’, Colette is brazenly autobiographical but creates a heady fictional self, which is something different. Ostensibly a Balzacian provincial episode (fiery Spanish ex-postmistress, older ...”

“... my own views on the origins of honours examinations in late Georgian Oxford corroborated by V.H.H. Green in his chapter on ‘Reformers and Reform in the University’. A giant’s strength is wonderful, proclaims Miranda, but not if monstrously used. If, however, as Metternich said, you can do anything with bayonets except sit on them, then surely you can do ...”

“... it.’ Aiken was also the recipient of this meditation: ‘The idea of a submarine world of clear green light – one would be attached to a rock and swayed in two directions – would one be happiest or most wretched at the turn of the tide?’ This fancy probably owes something to some strenuous lines in Antony and ...”

“... Kafka (the first English translation of ‘Metamorphosis’, again by Jolas), Michel Leiris, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Herbert Read, Soupault and Jolas himself. Glancing through its faded and disintegrating back issues or reading Dougald McMillan’s transition: The History of a Literary Era 1927-38 (1975), one finds an astonishing compendium of the most ...”

“... have outlined could be unbearable in the hands of any writer less sensitive than Elizabeth Bowen. Henry James had a similar theme on his hands in The Wings of the Dove. He cooled the cruelty of it by intellectualising its moral problem. Colette could take any amount of cruelty on the chin and in her hard-bitten way grin at it like a mauled boxer. With ...”

“... health. What he was proposing, said one critic, was ‘the greatest seizure of property since Henry VIII confiscated the monasteries’. In retrospect, he seems to have achieved the impossible. He had to gather public support, pacify doctors, and – most troublesome of all – win the backing of a sceptical Cabinet. The NHS Bill received Royal Assent on ...”

“... Palmer, were George Richmond and Edward Calvert. Shoreham for the Ancients functioned as, in Henry James’s phrase, ‘the Great Good Place’ – ‘a valley so hidden,’ Calvert said, ‘that it looked as if the devil had not yet found it out.’ The Shoreham spirit that emerges from the letters and reminiscences seems as much larky as it was rapt, a ...”

“... wide cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry.’ Housman originally planned to publish A Shropshire Lad anonymously as Poems by Terence Hearsay, and ‘Terence’ (after his exilic namesake, the Latin playwright brought to Rome as a slave) is one of many who trudge this landscape – locals and ...”

“... because he did not have the fare to return to London. But gradually his studio in St Stephen’s Green became a place for people to stop by and talk. If often the conversation was more intense and polished than the work produced, the painter himself did not seem to mind. Among those who came to his studio were Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Millington ...”

“... tourists love, just as there’s a head of Joyce, which no one much looks at, in St Stephen’s Green. When Nora stood Joyce up on 14 June, he wrote to her ardently, demanding another date. They met on 16 June, which is when their story began, and when Ulysses both began and ended. Lucky it wasn’t on Good Friday, when the pubs are closed. I wonder if the ...”

“... and then a gallery saw them and I just began taking windows and putting them in galleries.’Henry Geldzahler, a young curatorial assistant at the Metropolitan Museum, went to visit Warhol’s townhouse to find him working on his earliest Pop paintings:I walked into the studio, we looked at each other and we both started laughing. And I saw on the shelf ...”

“... to Middlesex Special Branch, whose investigations revealed it to be the residence of his uncle Henry, a postal worker, who ‘has been described by a reliable informant as a sneering, critical type of person, harsh of speech, half Jew in appearance … [and] believed to be an energetic communist’ (he was in fact a longstanding Labour councillor). From ...”

“... or charcoal drawings illustrating the dramas, Hamlet’s being an exceptionally taut tableau by Henry Fuseli of the Prince of Denmark, Horatio and the Ghost seeming to struggle against each other as the announcement of murder and the agitated response to it gripped them. The two of us sat in the front reception room, she in a big armchair, I on a stool next ...”

“... that reached back to Jonathan Edwards and Amy Lowell. Bishop once confessed that she was ‘green with envy’ at Lowell’s pedigree: ‘All you have to do is put down the names!’ Her husband might stray, but Hardwick was confident he would always find his way back home. This is why, when Lowell left her for Caroline Blackwood, her first reaction was ...”

“... and those cities must have excellent connections with London.’ Without HS2, Steer argues, the green belt and vast swathes of unprotected countryside will have to be developed. If provision isn’t made for rail, then people will be forced onto the roads. ‘HS2 is all about capacity, not speed,’ he says, ‘and that should have been made clear from the ...”