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“... Beale Street where the rackety blues clubs are, and the streetsweepers who ply it every day. Furry Lewis, one of his most affecting portraits, was one of the Deep South’s most important country blues artists. But blues doesn’t pay you a living, so, even though handicapped by an artificial leg, Lewis had to earn his ...”

“... which this scene occurs, and in which a whole series of versions of it are offered to us, is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, hailed as a masterpiece by some critics and viewers and deemed an annoying waste of time by others. I would say it’s a staring contest we can’t win. But we can’t lose either. The film is too wandering and awkward to be a ...”

“... and his art. His first novel, The Town and the City, written in 1947-48, was deeply indebted to Thomas Wolfe but otherwise a conventional narrative of a young man in a backwater city tortured by hope and hesitation, swept along by history. Cassady never hesitated, was always ready for the next thing, shrugged at rules, compelled attention. His comings and ...”

“... military waste-paper basket of 100 AD. The originals can be seen at the British Museum. Bowman and Thomas provide the first and the final publication. Their book does more than decipher the faded and broken scrawl (difficult enough in itself): it provides, with enviable erudition, the whole necessary context, linguistic, historical and palaeographic. The texts ...”

“... language were ruder and less polished than those of their Continental counterparts. The translator Thomas Hoby called for writers to translate important works in order to enrich their own language, so that ‘we alone of the worlde maye not bee styll counted barbarous in our tunge, as in time out of minde we have bene in our maners’. For Hoby and his ...”

“... al-Andalus.Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe, written in the 1390s for his ten-year-old son, Lewis, is an English translation of a Latin version of an Arabic text written by Mashallah ibn Athari, an eighth-century Persian Jew. In the prologue, Chaucer says that Lewis only knows a little Latin, but is good with ...”

“... a first bibliography, and respectful salutations from across the literary scene: Dylan Thomas emerged best from the exercise, warmly praising ‘a wide and deep poet’ before adding, impishly: ‘Congratulations on Auden’s seventieth birthday.’ He did indeed seem senior beyond his years. The issue had a double-page Faber advert, on one side of ...”

“... 1663-64, 1685), followed by the editions of Nicholas Rowe (1709), Alexander Pope (1725), Lewis Theobald (1733), Sir Thomas Hanmer (1744) and William Warburton (1747) – and each had been able to offer what a modern commissioning editor would call a Unique Selling Point. The First Folio had supplied 18 plays which ...”

“... through. He also takes time to revisit earlier books. Boss Cupid’s epigraph, a quotation from Thomas Hardy – ‘Well, it’s a cool queer tale!’ – first caught Gunn’s eye in an essay written in 1972, where he cited it straight-faced; now it is reused to point up the modern connotations of ‘cool’ and ‘queer’. The second poem of the ...”

“... Tate Britain until 21 August), there are many examples of that freshness: two of the most famous, Thomas Girtin’s The White House at Chelsea and Turner’s Blue Rigi, hang side by side. There is also Bonington’s view of the Piazza dell’Erbe in Verona, which gives a sense of moving crowds and shifting light that makes Canaletto’s Venetian crowds and ...”

“... told us that his Aretina (1660) was the first novel by a Scotsman (and he mght have mentioned Sir Thomas Urquhart). It is misleading to describe Viscount Dundee as a ‘romantic Jacobite’. He was as committed a Protestant as those he fought against, leading an army that was Protestant only in part. Convictions were everywhere and romanticism an unheard-of ...”

“... it’s true that Keith Douglas was always conscious of Isaac Rosenberg behind his shoulder, Alun Lewis of Edward Thomas. But the idea of modern warfare as one thing and of poetic response to it as another seems, in retrospect, almost Churchillian in its fixedness. Back then, although we loved the old rogue for the ...”

“... of giving us the sum of his wisdom. Philip Toynbee revered that extremely articulate Trappist, Thomas Merton, but soon got fed up with his nimble sentences in praise of Love, presenting it, placing it, and saying all it can do. Can it? Toynbee says he prefers to try not to use the word at all. He has many facetious moments, though the facetiousness does ...”

“... by the loss of real children: his three-year-old daughter Catharine and her six-year-old brother Thomas died within months of each other in 1812. Wordsworth mourned both children deeply, but it was Catharine’s death that stirred him into poetry. Catharine, like Little Nell, is the child of a departed paradise, leaving her father to confront the fact that ...”

“... exceptional remarks: gloom was everywhere. At the beginning of the 1960s, Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford, America’s most famous writers on urban issues, sensed a crisis on the horizon, but they didn’t foresee just how badly things would turn out. Nor did Robert Moses, who had been in charge of city planning since the 1920s, and whose mammoth ...”