“... Moorcock’s distemper remains, despite the viral assaults of life in a genetically-modified George W. Bush fiefdom (fevers, sweats, steroid-regimens), genially satiric rather than venomous and bile-secreting; he targets the virtual reality spooks of Lit-Lite. The fawn jackets. The suit-bags. The shaved sentences. English fiction (the creative reading ...”

“... connected. He sat in Stravinsky’s box for the premiere of The Rite of Spring; he dined with George V and Queen Mary; he knew Verlaine, Degas, Monet, Manet and Rodin; he worshipped Wagner and helped support Nietzsche’s sister; he collaborated with D’Annunzio and wrote an oratorio with a score by Debussy. He took part in the atrocities committed by ...”

“... and impressive that ‘Dent was willing to invest in so many lengthy and intimidating classics: George Grote’s History of Greece in 12 volumes, Hakluyt’s Voyages . . . in eight, J.A. Froude’s History of England in ten, 15 volumes of Balzac and six of Ibsen.’ No less impressive was the stamina and catholicity of the implied Everyman reader, and the ...”

“... agreed he was a genius, but they were not all sure he was a poet. Wilde’s quip – ‘Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning’ – expresses a view shared by admirers such as George Eliot and Henry James, doubters like Carlyle and Hopkins, and a chorus of others. But the history of poetry is a history ...”

“... great modernists of the postwar era: Ligeti, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, George Benjamin. But Messiaen had no interest in moulding acolytes. He urged his students to follow their intuitions and – in the case of foreign-born pupils – their native traditions. ‘You have the good fortune of being Greek, of being an architect and ...”

“... Judy Garland, Henry Hathaway, Van Heflin, Fritz Lang, Burt Lancaster, Audie Murphy, Burgess Meredith, Groucho Marx, Vincente Minnelli, Gregory Peck, Vincent Price, Robert Ryan, Edward G. Robinson, Donna Reed, Nicholas Ray, Robert Siodmak, Frank Sinatra, Sylvia Sidney, Claire Trevor, Franchot Tone, Walter Wanger, Keenan Wynn, William Wyler, Orson ...”

“... He seems to be having a freer period. The one in the Academy –‘Low Tide’ – bought by Meredith for the Municipal is overwhelming … In the end we went out, down to Charlemont House [the Municipal Gallery] to find out about Sunday opening, & then to Jury’s for a drink. He parted as usual with an offer to buy me a Herald. I hope to see him again ...”

“... his period, left a lasting manifesto of critical method. He was no provincial, admiring Goethe and George Eliot along with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. But most of what he wrote on literary matters he left unpublished, and his range was essentially French. As a critic, he is remembered today principally for his dismissal of Sainte-Beuve’s aberration in talking ...”

“... one to Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, who is ‘disgusted’ by it, just as his adored friend H.O. Meredith later ‘despised’ Maurice: ‘Reluctant to read, dismissed it at once from his mind.’ Such rebuffs would long be a peril of making anything about gay life explicit, even to another gay man, such as Dickinson. Returning in 1922 from India, after ...”