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“... gain in this loss of verve, since the shimmering beauty of Barry’s imagery can sail perilously close to sheer fancifulness, even absurdity: ‘Her eyes had the green of the writing on a tram ticket,’ ‘Her legs are like the slender pillars of the courthouse in Baltinglass,’ and other such embarrassments. Barry can produce prose of great splendour, but ...”

“... not valid under Swedish law, so his entire estate has gone to his brother and father. The estate, close to worthless at the time of his death, is now a multi-million-dollar concern. This has led, unsurprisingly, to acrimony. Larsson had been in a 32-year relationship with fellow anti-Nazi campaigner Eva Gabrielsson, but as they never married, she was not ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 31: He seems to me equal to the gods that man whoever he is who opposite you sits and listens close to your sweet speaking and lovely laughing – oh it puts the heart in my chest on wings for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking is left in me no: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin and in eyes no sight and drumming fills ears ...”

“... the smell found them, the smell and the uproar of flesh learning its mortality.’ There is frank talk of ‘preacherly drivel’ and a fine description of Queen Victoria as the ‘much-beloved though humourless dumpling of legend’. An American couple, surprised to find themselves hopelessly in love, are said to be ‘both so easily ridden in on by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... day, he remembers something he didn’t actually get to see: the ground is ‘where I once missed Frank Woolley just out when I arrived having made something like 70 in half an hour’. Others send birthday greetings, only to be trumped by the recipient: ‘The day doesn’t bother me. Just another. No better no worse. But the avalanche is appalling.’ Or ...”

“... in one volume … whose mysteries not even himself could read’. The coffin, a writing surface close to death, is the only object to survive the Pequod’s wreck. It serves as a lifeboat to convey Ishmael to safety – which, given that Ishmael is our narrator, makes it a device that delivers to us the entire content of the novel. It’s a literal ...”

“... it was just a secretarial mistake that she had been flown out to Los Angeles. I don’t think many close to the action doubted that Hawks intended to take her to bed. He ended up putting her under a personal service contract, changed her first name to Lauren, and ordered her to bring her voice and her gaze down. Hawks liked sophisticated women who could flirt ...”

“... its incorporation of stray materials, the personal touch on the elbow that the American poet Frank Bidart, a close friend and associate of Lowell’s, ‘both amanuensis and sounding-board’ for the many books of sonnets, has brought to it. (A no doubt garbled account once reached me of Lowell flying Bidart across the ...”

“... how to fend these off while yet remaining in a dialogue. And as with patients, so with Freud, Very close became too close. They challenged each other: Jung believed Freud was having an affair with his sister-in-law, and that the triangle was skewing Freud’s theories. Freud took a closer look at Jung’s dream of his ...”

“... cases came from knowing how to interpret the evidence. Angleton’s fascination with the power of close reading began when he was a student at Yale in the late 1930s in the era of I.A. Richards and the New Criticism, which held that the meaning of a poem came from the poem itself, and was completely independent of the history of the poet. Indeed, it was ...”

“... piece of cast-iron in Plaça del Rei, or Lichtenstein’s colourful, brash, cartoon-like sculpture close to the waterfront, or Subirachs’s literal-minded and awkward-looking monument to President Macià in Plaça de Catalunya, or Botero’s silly cat on Rambla del Raval, or some of the other more playful adornments on the beach in Barceloneta, ...”

“... Carlo and when it was clear that Queensberry was in possession of compromising letters, Wilde met Frank Harris and George Bernard Shaw at the Café Royal. When Harris vehemently sought to persuade him to drop the case and leave the country and Shaw agreed, Wilde seemed to be coming around to their view. (‘You are sure to lose it,’ Harris told him. ‘You ...”

“... entering the mainstream of American life.Bell’s biography is an unusual book, written by a ‘close friend’ (in Bell’s words) and divided into eight parts, named for Stone’s eight novels. Each part relates the genesis, the false starts, the tortured progress, the ordeal of finishing, and the critical and commercial fate of the novels as they ...”