“... later this editorial attitude had hardened: Kinghorn and Law’s 1974 edition of the poems of Allan Ramsay and Fergusson included only two of Fergusson’s English poems (and none of Ramsay’s); James Robertson’s Selected Poems, published in 2000, and the most accessible edition of Fergusson’s poetry in print, contains only four poems in English. The ...”

“... The death of a beautiful woman,’ Edgar Allan Poe wrote, ‘is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.’ Mary Rogers, ‘the Beautiful Cigar Girl’ whose corpse was fished from the Hudson in New York in 1841, was the prototype for many subsequent mystery tales – not least Poe’s own story, ‘The Mysterious Death of Marie Roget ...”

“... came a question from the audience. What did I think was the biggest mistake the New Left made? If young radicals wanted to reach the ‘masses’, I replied, they should connect means to ends and refrain from abusing the symbols of American patriotism. The American New Left was almost unique in turning against America’s own patriotic heroes and ...”

“... of his own sexuality. All of these productions are considered at length in The Magic Box, Rob Young’s hefty survey of occult British film and television. Young, who wrote the excellent Electric Eden (2010), a history of the British folk-rock movement which was almost contemporaneous with these broadcasts, finds that ...”

“... called Mr Starkie, recognising an unusual capacity in the girl, lent her The Sorrows of Young Werther. She started keeping a diary when she was 12. She collected Classic Comics. The family moved to Southern California, and she grew more desperate to get away. ‘I believe … that the only difference between human beings is intelligence,’ she ...”

“... close in on the events and people and things that have nearly touched him nearly: the death of a young subaltern in the war, an adulterous affair with his sister-in-law and with many others, a painting, an unsuccessfully defended murderer – but usually, death. He is a man who has devoted himself to shrinking feeling to the point where the renunciation of a ...”

“... which introduces us to an older England, from Burton to Kipling; ‘The Americans’, from Edgar Allan Poe to Truman Capote, a culture as far from us in space as is the older England in time; ‘My Contemporaries’, from Ivy Compton-Burnett to V.S. Naipaul, where the richest, funniest and saddest anecdotes are to be found; and a short fourth ...”

“... in the 1970s; and my hair is now greyer than hers. I, too, sometimes talk gratingly about ‘the young’ or ‘young people’; I, too, hate the sense that I inhabit an academic bastion which seems to be losing status year by year because women like me are part of it; I, too, miss the time when we could write pungently ...”

“... confirmation: ‘the question of a disability – Coleridge and Francis Thompson and Edgar Allan Poe had their addiction to opium, Pope his lameness, Cowper his depression, John Clare his insanity.’ Family disasters fed the desire for dark afflictions: her brother’s epilepsy, the death by drowning of a sister, like Browning’s Evelyn Hope ...”

“... supposed failure to mourn. Atlas writes: ‘Failed my mother!’ cries Louie … confessing to his young son the shabby sexual adventure that he engaged in as she lay on her deathbed: ‘That may mean, will mean, little or nothing to you, my only child, reading this document.’ To Bellow, it meant everything. Again, the stylistic equivalent of an operatic ...”

“... universities, infiltrated the ranks of the professoriat and proceeded to poison the minds of the young. The academy was overrun by these ‘tenured radicals’ (as Roger Kimball put it in his 1990 book), engaged in the promulgation of an ‘illiberal education’ (Dinesh D’Souza in 1991), dedicated to ‘the closing of the American mind’ (...”

“... like pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) and Kaposi’s sarcoma, rarely seen in otherwise healthy young people. A number of theories were proposed as to its origins, some unscientific (‘the wrath of God’), and others (homosexuality or Haitians) generally discredited once the human immunodeficiency virus had been isolated. The race to identify the ultimate ...”

“... Peeping Tom (1960), Michael Powell’s brutal parable on the nature of film, a woman confronts a young cameraman, Mark, in his darkroom. Mrs Stephens, who is blind, realises there’s something disturbing about Mark, something linked to his compulsive filmmaking. ‘I’m listening to my instinct now. And it says: “All this filming isn’t ...”

“... whether I say it with seven, twelve or 21 tones is of very little importance.’ When a young Robert Craft visited Schoenberg he was struck by his humility, ‘plated all the way down with a hubris of stainless steel’. Each of his notes was important.Schoenberg didn’t take criticism well. The artist should remain independent and unconcerned by ...”

“... the Moon (1894), does not, as popular belief has it, depict John and Salome, but ‘Narraboth, the young Syrian’, who ‘loves Salome and kills himself out of jealousy; and his homosexual admirer, the Page of Herodias ... who urges Narraboth to look at the moon’ – the face of Wilde – ‘rather than at Salome’. She underscores the sexual ambiguity ...”