“... writing of Ulysses, episode by episode, each more striking than the last. In the imaginary music hall created by these publications, he would devise one routine after another. (When he finished the Penelope episode, he described it as ‘the clou’, the star turn of the book.) ‘The public,’ Pound protested in 1919, ‘don’t demand a new style per ...”

“... from England, stayed with Mike’s family in New Jersey (who took him to Radio City Music Hall where he probably saw the Rockettes), then moved on to California and took up studies with Yvor Winters at Stanford, an hour’s drive south of San Francisco. He got a great deal from his time with Winters and wrote about it at length in what may be his ...”

“... Martin Amis had a few reservations about the book’s popularity with scholarly intermediaries. James Joyce, he concluded, ‘could have been the most popular boy in the school, the funniest, the cleverest, the kindest. He ended up with a more ambiguous distinction: he became the teacher’s pet.’ How is Amis getting on in this notional academy? In ...”

“... it cannot use it in practice.’ In his late teens Cole began a correspondence course with Wolsey Hall in Oxford, and another, not long after, with the New York Institute of Photography. He also gained work at Zonk!, a mass-circulation magazine founded in 1949 and aimed at a Black South African readership with money to spend. Not much is known about how Cole ...”

“... locality; places which survived into the 1960s and were familiar to me, too. The St Margaret’s Hall and the Kinema Ballroom, Dunfermline; the Palais, Cowdenbeath; and the ‘Snake Pit’, Rosyth. That wasn’t the last’s real name, which neither my aunt nor I could remember. It was really no more than a big room above the Co-op store, near the roundabout ...”

“... the greasy couches and scarred tabletops’, and the neighbours – the woman across the hall, for instance, to whom she lent $50 and who called her a ‘dirty cunt’ when she asked for it back.The Ghostly Lover, her first novel, a coming-of-age story set in Kentucky, was published in 1945. It brought her to the attention of the editors at Partisan ...”

“... things to burn. There is certain to be a great deal to feel shy about, but unless you’re Henry James, or somebody else fascinated by the idea of authorial control even after death, leavings are just leavings. You appoint literary executors in the hope that they will show good judgment. Notes to John exposes Didion and Dunne to the coarse explicitness they ...”

“... so close to the leather-jacketed, blue-jeaned rock idol (the ‘love child of Bob Dylan and James Brown’, as Jon Stewart joked) that we could almost have fist-bumped. To get this close, we journos had to bring specific photo ID (‘driver’s licence or passport’), be searched, undertake to make notes only with pen and notepad, refrain from ...”

“... the provocation for a pedestrian expedition testing the Brexit boundaries of a timeless mead-hall England, before the fleet of plundering Papist Normans came sailing over the horizon. Just as tabloid gangs of Albanian drug-trafficking white slavers were now reputed to be sneaking ashore on Romney Marshes, at Deal and Camber Sands, on their Rigid ...”

“... sense of complexity, a bit like Gaia itself. (ANT, too, seems analogous to the complex system that James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis intuited as they built out their hypothesis in the early 1970s.) The days of the garrulous sciences returning from the field, or the lab, to announce their findings about objects unable to speak for themselves were over. So was ...”

“... the school and under the Forth’, their fathers mined, then decorated the art rooms and the hall with pictures of swarming prehistoric life. A mother came to complain that her son had ‘done no work’ for a fortnight, he had been ‘taking encyclopedias home and reading them to all hours’ instead of doing ‘the kind of work that will help him to be ...”

“... who took an interest in their pupils. In the first years of the century, Joseph Jowett of Trinity Hall (who arranged the setting from Handel which became famous as the chime of Big Ben) was noted ‘for the perennial freshness of his interest in young men’ – though he, like Simeon, was drawn to them by his evangelical faith in their souls as well as by ...”

“... anyone who can.’ Among others who leapt to the defence of culture as they knew it were Donald Hall, Herbert Gold, Delmore Schwartz, Truman Capote (on Kerouac: ‘that’s not writing, that’s type-writing’), Robert Brustein and James Dickey (‘Howl is the skin of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer thrown over the ...”

“... Whig Dr Johnson’), the great liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte Smith, as well as Godwin’s publisher George Robinson and a number of dissenting ministers who, largely forgotten now, were important public ...”

“... sense of precision, and his reticence. No one has said that Armstrong was garrulous, but in James Hansen’s biography, First Man, as well as in the film made of the book starring Ryan Gosling and in the recent documentary Armstrong, he comes across as a man of understated wit. Asked to describe what had been a near-death experience, Armstrong merely ...”