“... came out in 1964 in a City Lights edition uniform (except that it was blue and red, not black and white) with Ginsberg’s Howl, Kaddish and Reality Sandwiches. Two years later O’Hara was dead, killed by a dune buggy at an all-night party on Fire Island. There was something Keatsian about his poetry, its vividness and particularity, and its ...”

“... pathetic you were in cheesecloth he’d green shades I could scream still the Society of Jesus White Fathers it’s invisible as that day the same day she and me we made a heavy pretence of love I mean we’d a drunken fuck in the afternoon after a dockland lunch the Land of Green Ginger its smell of sex herrings desire             ‘Sure ...”

“... and will be written by Max Beloff. For some years I occupied a house next door to the artist William, commonly known as Bobby, Roberts. Bobby Roberts was the most taciturn person I have ever known. I had been his neighbour for twenty years before he would occasionally acknowledge my existence as we passed each other, and even then no sound escaped from ...”

“... spared. She went to London, alone, and turned up at the Slade determined to enrol as a student; William Coldstream, the Slade’s director, happened to walk by while she was pleading her case with the receptionist, listened to her story and, without further ado, accepted her. The film is haunting, and its two non-actor stars are its enthralling ...”

“... recent novel deals with one of the most fraught subjects in US history: the long march of General William Tecumseh Sherman in the final months of the Civil War. The election of 1864 was a referendum on whether the Union should fight to achieve total victory or seek a negotiated peace, which would almost certainly have required the Union to rescind its ...”

“... scar. How can the celebrity outsider maintain a sense of his identity, or painterly authority, when he is his own subject-matter and his audience sees that subject-matter as ‘other’, less than ‘us’? Basquiat’s solutions to this dilemma are often brilliant. In the triptych Zydeco (1984), for example, a cinematographer in profile looks through the lens of his movie camera ...”

“... should ‘use newspapers the way private diaries and personal letters were once used. At white heat, in the rush of an emotion, stimulated by an event, you write your reflections, hoping that someone will read them and then forget them.’ He appears to have missed the arrogance of the verb ‘use’ and the self-importance of thus imposing upon ...”

“... It is due for general release early next year. Available colours will include black, orange, grey, white and blue, or to put it in Google-speak: ‘charcoal, tangerine, shale, cotton, sky’. The prototypes have already gone out and are being used by the first generation of – sensitive readers will want their sickbags to hand – ‘Glass Explorers’. The ...”

“... away from her and died of pneumonia in a rural stationmaster’s house a few days later. Although William Nickell and the contemporary Russian journalists whose work he has explored for The Death of Tolstoy try to make an enigma of the 82-year-old writer’s ‘complex and provocative’ nocturnal flight from his ancestral home, the count had been brooding ...”

“... greatness. They have been performed magnificently by, for example, Joan Baez, Jimi Hendrix and the White Stripes. Then there was Donovan, a bit like Dan Bern without the sense of humour, or the critical distance. A.J. Weberman, self-styled Dylanologist, burrowed into the singer’s rubbish bins to try to make sense of him. And countless others have applied ...”

“... the Zoopraxiscope, a rotating version of the 19th-century magic lantern. Thomas Edison, along with William Dickson, invented the Kinetoscope, the machine that launched the commercial film industry, in 1891; in Edison’s Kinetoscope Parlours viewers peeped through a hole in the top of a wooden box to watch Annabelle Moore’s ‘Butterfly Dance’, to take one ...”

“... intentionally or mistakenly drunk a concoction called Battle’s Vermin Killer, which contained white phosphorus, a toxic substance which caused death after three days of agony. Montagu, Cholmondeley et al created an identity, that of Royal Marine Captain William ‘Bill’ Martin, for the corpse. They ‘discussed and ...”

“... The dim and sluggish hero finds himself standing next to an attractive blonde in a beret and white raincoat, whom he manages to ignore completely as he struggles to stay upright while unfurling his newspaper. She doesn’t quite return the lack of compliment. His antics amuse her, evidently, but there’s a hint of pleasurable speculation in her ...”

“... Ian​ Hamilton once recounted in the LRB (22 October 1992) that ‘when William F. Buckley Jr sent a copy of his essays to Norman Mailer, he pencilled a welcoming “Hi, Norman!” in the index, next to Mailer’s name.’ The index discloses a lot about the nature of a book, and the passions of its author, more than is sometimes realised (‘acknowledgments’ are similarly illuminating ...”

“... Afterwards she resolved to accept her addiction and shed her old identity; she dyed her hair white-blonde, became Anna Kavan, a name which seemed fortuitously reminiscent of Kafka. ‘Why does the K sound in a name symbolise the struggle of those who try to make themselves at home on a homeless borderland?’ she wrote. Asylum Piece, her first book ...”