“... Edward Thomas​ called the approach to Oxford by train ‘the most contemptible in Europe’. There’s no view to speak of, and the station is a big shed with lots of glass and cheap detailing: blue pillars and PVC fascias. The city’s relationship to the railway, like its relationship to the world, is arrogant but insecure, high-minded but petty ...”

“... knew their limitations. After being absorbed into the art-world mainstream, under the patronage of Edward Steichen, he began to make a play of them. One page of Naked City (1945), his first collection, displays a pure black rectangle. A reproduction of a fully developed sheet of blank photographic stock, it is captioned: ‘This is unexposed film of Greenwich ...”

“... of Saki is published explicitly for children – Saki’s stories could certainly be read by young people, but only by the kind who relish the earlier versions of fairy tales, those in which Red Riding Hood is eaten, and Cinderella’s stepmother decapitated with the lid of a trunk – and proposes a candidate for Saki’s heir by way of its ...”

“... of that other world?’ Perhaps every person here, ‘man or woman, it doesn’t matter, old or young’, has already committed suicide. For nearly two decades, Grossman has been turning over in his mind the possibility that Israel, miraculous nation as it likes to see itself, might in fact be a moribund state. ‘In order to maintain culture, and ...”

“... and which represents a smaller but no less striking solution to the same challenge. Pippa, a young silk-mill worker, begins the poem springing out of bed with her annual day’s leave before her: ‘How must I spend my Day?’ She decides to pick a path through her town that will bring her close to a number of locals whose various happy situations she ...”

“... new team have forced the departure of one of its political columnists, the deputy-editor, Hugo Young – a writer any newspaper might be glad to employ. As to what is happening at the Times – well, reading tastes differ: but who could ever have imagined that the Thunderer would seek to entice readers by conducting an up-market bingo game which is ...”

“... best left to newspapers: the role of the radio news bulletin was to encourage people to buy them. Edward Stourton recounts that one broadcast began: ‘Good evening, today is Good Friday. There is no news.’ By the mid-1930s, however, the BBC had set up a small news department as part of its burgeoning bureaucracy. It employed no reporters – news items ...”

“... very spiritual artist”, replied: “Oh, Mr Symons, you must remember that we have an audience of young ladies as well as an audience of agnostics”’ Yeats wrote furiously to a leading newspaper to protest against the censorship, but he was told that ‘the editor makes it a rule that the paper is never to mention Beardsley’s name.’ From rapid and ...”

“... College in the same year, Lewis was soon enjoying meetings of the Wee Teas, a dining club of young academics who liked talking philosophy. Next there was the Martlets, a literary society whose members read their stories to one another. Tolkien and Lewis finally met in 1926 and duly formed a club called the Cave for members of the Oxford English School ...”

“... Domosławski’s book came out in Poland in 2010, instantly creating an uproar. Domosławski was a young journalist who, like most of his colleagues, had for years adored Kapuściński as a great writer and reporter. He became – or made himself – something of a favourite disciple, constantly visiting the maestro at home or interviewing him for different ...”

“... of macaroni and the wine. That’s how fiction works.) But what the novel takes for granted is the young hero’s military status. Ernie didn’t. Every other letter through the latter half of 1917 into 1918 is filled with hopes of a secondment, but the truth is he missed most of the war and made a great deal of the skirmish that cut his legs. (No bones were ...”

“... discovered an ally in Whitman, just as Whitman’s many early admirers in England had done, like Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds, who seemed primarily taken with his poetry because it spoke for and to gay men like themselves. He is at his frequent best, however, when his poetry is least negotiable in the hands of people who read it on the ...”

“... grimly dramatises its author’s terror. Closer to home, and to the immobility against which the young Edith chafed, is the ‘static force’ of Lily Bart’s aunt in The House of Mirth (1905): ‘To attempt to bring her into active relation with life was like tugging at a piece of furniture which has been screwed to the floor.’ Long after Wharton herself ...”

“... to become a barrister but spent most of his time with literary friends, including the critic Edward Dowden and the poet John Todhunter. John and Susan named their first child William Butler Yeats. Soon afterwards they had a daughter, Lily. As a law student, John Butler Yeats had begun drawing – and his talent at it, as well as the influence of his ...”

“... against the grain of his own transcendentalism. ‘I am a passionately religious man,’ he told Edward Garnett in April 1914, as he was completing ‘The Wedding Ring’, an early version of The Rainbow and Women in Love, ‘and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.’ But it remains at least possible that his religious ...”