“... Cantor, George Burns, George Jessel and Sophie Tucker, but the future movie mogul Harry Cohn, the young Walter Winchell and his own older brother. Signed by the Shubert Brothers in 1911, Jolson was the first product of the bastard forms of vaudeville and minstrel show to be legitimised on Broadway’s Great White Way, where he addressed his audience with an ...”

“... making people throb with awakenedness.‘Instead of the philosophy being the clue to Lawrence,’ Stephen Potter wrote in 1930, ‘it will be Lawrence who is the clue to the philosophy.’ Almost a century later, Wilson takes a similar tack, although she is clearly not much taken with the philosophy in its own right: ‘For all his claims to prophetic ...”

“... waists’. Perhaps in that moment, or more likely in this much later one, Margot identified that young woman, shrinking under the conquering gaze of Sir Leslie, as a younger version of herself, the one she dramatised in her novel Octavia, ‘brought up in an atmosphere of Scotch austerity’ but with ‘a spiritual side to her nature which … tugged at her ...”

“... Stewart Parnell which took implicit but cheeky issue with his own magnum opus on the Chief. The young Bew – Belfast-born and a graduate of People’s Democracy marches as well as of the Cambridge history faculty – had already published a radical marxisant version of the 1879-82 Irish Land War, stressing the only partly suppressed war of interests ...”

“... non-committal titles. Inside the books her territory is classic – the love relationships of young people – but mapped with an unusual scrupulous smoothness. The characters are brainy, even startlingly so, but she doesn’t exalt their intelligence or flaunt her own. At the beginning of Normal People, Connell and Marianne are contemporaries at school ...”

“... fell-walker on a scale more heroic even than Wordsworth and Wordsworth’s sailor brother John. As Stephen Gill acutely points out in his recent Wordsworth biography, an excellent companion piece to Holmes on Coleridge, ‘Coleridge actually needed action, not the tranquillity of a domestic cot but excitement, whether it be from the demands of London or the ...”

“... art and literature. He might also be called ridiculous. Nobody was more warmly encouraging to any young writer or painter who promised to transcend the bounds of everyday life. In the Forties he was excited by the rattling rhetoric of the Apocalyptic poets, believing that the day of Audens and MacNeices was over, that poetry ‘must now be positive and ...”

“... rejected by the modern synthesis. These quotations come from a recent paper in Palaeobiology by Stephen Jay Gould. What is the new theory? Is it indeed likely to replace the currently orthodox ‘neo-Darwinian’ view? Proponents of the new view make a minimum and a maximum claim. The minimum claim is an empirical one concerning the nature of the fossil ...”

“... in Anthony Blond’s Book Book. According to Wilson (don, novelist, Sunday Telegraph reviewer, Young Fogey and former literary editor of the Spectator), there is now no literary reviewing worth the name in Britain: The days have vanished when reviewing was a ‘serious’ matter. The articles in the Sunday papers are far too short to be able to do justice ...”

“... plays, The Balt and The Immortal Husband. The relationship of poetry to theatre is spelled out in Stephen Yenser’s indispensable study, The Consuming Myth, to which I owe many of my thoughts about Merrill. As Merrill said in an interview, ‘In “An Urban Convalescence” I first hit upon this sense of the sell-reflexive side of the poem – that you can ...”

“... didn’t last, but Jean did secure two long interviews with the man himself, and she told the young editors George Plimpton and Robert Silvers that she would give the interview to the Paris Review, so long as they made her an associate editor. They took the material (Number 12 in their famous series ‘The Art of Fiction’) and Stein got her place on the ...”

“... begins in Paris, ‘the biggest city west of Cairo’ and ‘five times the size of London’. Stephen Nichols starts his chapter by discussing a young girl, Christine de Pizan, soon to be the first internationally known female French author. He takes us through the reasons for Paris’s pre-eminence – partly ...”

“... knew a thing or two about lachrymose tat, dismissed Wilson’s book as a ‘syrupy dish for young sentimentalists’. Wilson had the review suppressed and a puff inserted in its place. What is most remarkable about Wilson’s literary output is that he produced his vast and varied body of work while holding down the most prestigious humanities ...”

“... the eugenics movements of the early 20th century, and culminating in the loudest recent salvos, Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man and Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. Given the inflammatory nature of the topic, and the powerful sociopolitical questions it raises, it would pay a writer to tread gingerly here. Will ...”

“... firms dominated Iraq’s economic life. Riverboat freight on the Euphrates was monopolised by Stephen Lynch & Co. When the Chalabis set off for their frequent trips to Lebanon and elsewhere they travelled on the coaches of the Nairn Transport Company. Andrew Weir & Co, for whom Hadi Chalabi was the principal grain buyer, dominated the country’s barley ...”