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“... School, which had connections with Bedford College. Here, at the age of 14, she fell violently in love with her headmistress, Lucy Harrison. Miss Harrison was one of the great educationalists of the turn of the century. ‘There was something royal in her nature,’ Octavia Hill wrote. There was also a strongly masculine element. She was one of the ...”

“... has written a lengthy chapter on each member of his quartet. Yet Eliot is represented by ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and The Waste Land only, Stevens primarily by ‘Sunday Morning’ and ‘The World as Meditation’, Frost by a handful of short poems; while the chapter on Pound devotes almost as much attention to an early polemical ...”

“... embarrassing details of their personal life, including the publication of the kind of sloppy love letters which should never be seen by anyone but the recipient, at least until the grave has closed over both parties. Moreover, the letters which appear in the book are almost exclusively David’s to Debbie. This may imply that Mrs Owen vetoed the ...”

“... and Williams.) Some of the sentiments here are too easy; in ‘Description’, he writes: ‘I love the language/of the day’s ten thousand aspects.’ In ‘At the Boatyard’: What I love at the boatyard, at the end of Good Templar Place, is the scraped, accidental intensity of colour. In ‘To the Storm ...”

“... have been lost or destroyed. It would seem that most of her significant friendships and all of her love affairs were with women, and it was no doubt her lesbianism that led to the destruction of letters that her family would have found embarrassing. Contemporaries record that she was small and slender, looking younger than her age, with grey eyes and ash ...”

“... in the latter instance. The Whitehouse and Co judicial roll-call of the 1970s runs: Council of Love, Little Red Schoolbook, International Times, Schoolkids Oz, Growing Up, Last Tango in Paris, Gay News and many more. In all these, the legal weapon was brandished by middle-class agitators. So, too, when NAFF struck against the Unions in Gouriet v. Union of ...”

“... As one thinks of Harold Bloom, Auden’s description of Wyndham Lewis as a lonely old volcano comes to mind. Though not, like Lewis, ‘of the Right’, or indeed claiming any political alignment, Bloom erupts with comparable regularity and force. He prefers to be a one-man cultural opposition, waving only the banner of aesthetics; he says there are no Bloomians, but everybody knows him and all wonder, usually with exasperated affection, what he will do next ...”

“... rolls of things she’d inherited from an aunt who had worked for Mary Ellen and Henry’s son, Harold (who was called Felix). Vera had seen Felix in his old age … [she] was a beautiful woman in her seventies when I met her. In her youth she had sat for Augustus John.Johnson, born in 1934, is a Europhile American writer. She has divided her adult life ...”

“... away in a diary written during a particularly stressful moment in her life, when my father fell in love with a young American ornithologist called Bryan Obst. Bitterly, she wondered why she’d accepted this predicament all her married life. Her harshest entries were written late at night, but in the morning she found her angry emotions had vanished. Her ...”

“... The lesson of the girls: it’s not what one says but how one says it. English prose is in love with teasing, dismissive tones like theirs – often the tones we think of when we think of good writing – but leaves the experimental and the ethically careful standing in the street like a frowning man with a tin cup. This is most true of Nancy’s ...”

“... newspaper itself was perhaps the best in the world, well financed, brimming with talent and zeal. Harold Evans had taken over as Editor the previous year. Francis Wyndham and I later became close friends but at first he seemed formidable, even a little intimidating. He was already a legend among his contemporaries for his intellectual prowess, which seemed ...”

“... Towards the end of this rather bewildering book Harold Bloom explains that he doesn’t really expect the year 2000 to be catastrophic; we shall experience neither ‘rupture nor rapture’. The only danger he can see is that some people, maddened by the deferral of the end-time on which they had counted (or, in Bloomspeak, disappointed in their ‘expectation of release from the burdens of a society that is weary with its sense of belatedness, or “aftering” ’) might cut up rough when the year passes without apocalyptic incident ...”

“... The rumour of my death has long abated. The Greeks still love me, but I don’t love Greeks Except for one – or two; I must be fated To wander and to change; when the mast creaks I smell the salt and know my soul unsated Until it finds the language no man speaks. And what is that? some simpleton demands Who’s never heard the seething of the sands ...”

“... of helpers and informants. Flagging only in the last stretch of the alphabet, they range from Sir Harold Acton to Douglas Woodruff, and like his subject the author has evidently ‘made it his business to know people whom he thought worth knowing’. He dissociates himself from what he calls ‘the vacuum-cleaner school’ of biographers, but remains defiant ...”

“... limits of feminism, of happiness – and it delivers what its title promises, a new allegory about love. ‘Love’s work’ here stands defiantly for the life’s work, and the notion of living as an art turned into that harder thing, work, because this book has the best and most radiant qualities of an askesis, a ...”