“... to serve her husband in the British Antarctic Survey: they were expected to drink beer in the hall, while the officer class took cocktails in the drawing-room. The men preferred beer, we were told, and, given the choice, they might well have chosen ‘cloudy’, the connoisseur’s drop, before the filtered blandness of the more expensive ...”

“... her 1967 picture of identical twin girls taken in Roselle, New Jersey, in a Knights of Columbus Hall. The twins’ father thought that it was ‘the worst likeness of the girls we’d ever seen’, but that was hardly the point. The girls are standing, posing, right beside each other. They are wearing the same clothes. And they are looking at the ...”

“... like the other, for example Whichelo/Honeychurch, Lily/Lilia and, in Maurice, Ernest Merz/Maurice Hall and Max Garnett/Clive Durham.’ Given these criteria of resemblance, the names of Augustus Hervey and Cecil Vyse are not ‘quite dissimilar’, so Morgan may have seen his tutor Mr Hervey, who, like Cecil Vyse, wore ‘eyeglasses and a moustache’, trying ...”

“... but before they actually died; those who, like Nuland’s brother, faced death on a gurney in the hall because there was no room at the hospital and because the physician who might have intervened was away for the weekend; those who were called by their first names by total strangers; those abandoned by relatives; those who were lied to or ignored. The last ...”

“... writing of Ulysses, episode by episode, each more striking than the last. In the imaginary music hall created by these publications, he would devise one routine after another. (When he finished the Penelope episode, he described it as ‘the clou’, the star turn of the book.) ‘The public,’ Pound protested in 1919, ‘don’t demand a new style per ...”

“... from 1951, features Margaret Lockwood (best known for playing feisty period heroines opposite James Mason, who himself did Desert Island Discs in 1961 and 1981) sounding as if she’s narrating a public information film: the Eton boating song ‘conjures up for me a very pleasant English scene’.When the BBC switched to recording on tape, which could be ...”

“... Martin Amis had a few reservations about the book’s popularity with scholarly intermediaries. James Joyce, he concluded, ‘could have been the most popular boy in the school, the funniest, the cleverest, the kindest. He ended up with a more ambiguous distinction: he became the teacher’s pet.’ How is Amis getting on in this notional academy? In ...”

“... a hyper-uranian aspect to become an eternal pasture folded in all thought so that there is a hall therein that is a made place, created by light wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall. As a mature poet, Duncan was accused by his friend Charles Olson – along with just about everyone else who read his work – of wanton myth-mongering, a charge ...”

“... Stead seems to have been misremembering or paraphrasing a line of Virginia Woolf’s about Henry James) grew out of D.T. Max’s post-mortem profile of Wallace for the New Yorker, and is very much the version of his life as seen from Times Square. ‘Every story has a beginning and this is David Wallace’s’ is Max’s first sentence. It’s a funny way to ...”

“... from England, stayed with Mike’s family in New Jersey (who took him to Radio City Music Hall where he probably saw the Rockettes), then moved on to California and took up studies with Yvor Winters at Stanford, an hour’s drive south of San Francisco. He got a great deal from his time with Winters and wrote about it at length in what may be his ...”

“... it cannot use it in practice.’ In his late teens Cole began a correspondence course with Wolsey Hall in Oxford, and another, not long after, with the New York Institute of Photography. He also gained work at Zonk!, a mass-circulation magazine founded in 1949 and aimed at a Black South African readership with money to spend. Not much is known about how Cole ...”

“... 1st September 1939 finding him not in a dive on 52nd Street but in some bleak provincial drill hall having those famous bunyons vetted for service in the Intelligence Corps. Auden might (and some say should) have condemned himself to five years as a slipshod major, sitting in a dripping Nissen hut in Beaconsfield decoding German intelligence, with ...”

“... locality; places which survived into the 1960s and were familiar to me, too. The St Margaret’s Hall and the Kinema Ballroom, Dunfermline; the Palais, Cowdenbeath; and the ‘Snake Pit’, Rosyth. That wasn’t the last’s real name, which neither my aunt nor I could remember. It was really no more than a big room above the Co-op store, near the roundabout ...”

“... the greasy couches and scarred tabletops’, and the neighbours – the woman across the hall, for instance, to whom she lent $50 and who called her a ‘dirty cunt’ when she asked for it back.The Ghostly Lover, her first novel, a coming-of-age story set in Kentucky, was published in 1945. It brought her to the attention of the editors at Partisan ...”

“... things to burn. There is certain to be a great deal to feel shy about, but unless you’re Henry James, or somebody else fascinated by the idea of authorial control even after death, leavings are just leavings. You appoint literary executors in the hope that they will show good judgment. Notes to John exposes Didion and Dunne to the coarse explicitness they ...”