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“... of the contemporary.’ To arrive at the Door of No Return doesn’t require a visit to the Maison des Esclaves in Dakar, because the door is internalised. Despite generations of resistance, the ‘body is the prison’.The spectral and the captive recur as figures in Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, Brand’s 24th book and sixth work of non-fiction. Her ...”

“... of Titian, of Mola, of Salvator, of the Poussins, Claude, Rubens, Elzheimer, Rembrandt, and Wilson, spurns all relation with this kind of map-work. Fuseli did introduce a small saving clause in defence of painters of ‘Views’: their ‘enumerations’ of the objects in a scene become ‘little more than topography’ only if they are not ‘assisted ...”

“... was heir to a long tradition of oral poetry.’In September 1928 Parry took up a teaching job in Des Moines, Iowa. Marian was quite happy to be back in the Midwest, though not so happy when Milman went to New York over Christmas to give a paper to the American Philological Association. ‘I was left then in the snow and ice with a can opener,’ she later ...”

“... I remember The hyacinth garden. Those are pearls that were his eyes, yes! In other words, as G. Wilson Knight first pointed out in 1972, the ‘hyacinth girl’ was initially conceived as male and, like Phlebas, appears to have drowned, or so the section’s concluding quotation from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde suggests: ‘Öd’ und leer das ...”

“... his long and loving friendship with the self-thwarting Esther Murphy in The Fifties (1986), Edmund Wilson recalled how vividly, if also profligately, Murphy – whose particular tragedy was to have an alcohol-saturated writer’s block of mammoth proportions and lifelong duration – embodied ‘the special characteristics of our race of the 1920s: habit of ...”

“... his relation to his age has always been self-divided. He said he had no relation to it. Edmund Wilson wrote in 1938 that the poems ‘went on vibrating for decades’, despite their lethal pastoral of condemned men and suicides, soldiers and doomed lovers, their stopped clock of velleities and arrested intimacies. The poems have often been mothballed as ...”

“... newly independent Algerian parliament; Willy Brandt, the future chancellor of West Germany; Harold Wilson, on the eve of his first term as prime minister; and François Mitterrand, who as minister of justice approved the execution of at least forty Algerian nationalists during the independence struggle. A separate French protest was signed by Jean-Paul Sartre ...”

“... is to empower France in foreign markets, and the government agency that owns it, L’Agence des participations de l’Etat, isn’t embarrassed to say so. In her foreword to the agency’s 2010 report, Christine Lagarde – then minister for economic affairs in François Fillon’s cabinet – boasted that the state would be more active than ever in ...”

“... through the capital with their ears open for sedition. A drinker in a tavern near the place des Victoires claimed: ‘Our women of Les Halles will go to Versailles to dethrone the King and tear his eyes out.’ A month later, when the King wanted to move palaces, he would not go through Paris, but had a path cut through the Bois de Boulogne, which was ...”

“... Proust’s 270 appearing in The Dream, and the title of Proust’s second volume – A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs – could all but perfectly fit the first 62 chapters of his novel. But to move from the band at Balbec to the verse-cappers of the Daguanyuan, the garden within the clan compound, is to cast lucozade away for wine, so enormously ...”

“... which has somehow got out of hand . . . A poverty of invention which is almost pathetic,’ Edmund Wilson wrote in 1956. ‘A combination of Wagner and Winnie-the-Pooh,’ the poet John Heath-Stubbs joshed at around the same time. ‘My nightmare,’ added Germaine Greer.The quite funny one-liners abound, but it’s much harder to find someone writing sensibly ...”