“... of the windows were dark and a notion of privacy seemed embedded in the stone. It must have been close to half past ten, because there was a sudden burst of fireworks over Edinburgh Castle – a nightly feast in August as the military tattoo concludes its parade. In his boyhood, Robert Louis Stevenson would sometimes be surprised while walking in the New ...”

“... pleasure, or perhaps to discover whether he would enjoy it, he bent over and brought his vile face close to the face of the judge’s wife and kissed her mouth.Ana returned to life, overcome by nausea … For she thought that she had felt on her lips the cold and slimy belly of a toad.The end!What do these four examples have in common? In all of them, the gay ...”

“... not to find himself mentioned, nevertheless recognised something ‘truly masterly’; and Frank Kermode wrote that Ellmann’s account would ‘fix Joyce’s image for a generation’, a judgment that, as Zachary Leader rightly comments, was if anything an underestimate. Leader, himself the distinguished biographer of Kingsley Amis and Saul ...”

“... American correspondent, who had metamorphosed into an anti-collectivist cold warrior. There was Frank Meyer, who had been deported from Britain for organising communist students (he also found time to date Ramsay MacDonald’s daughter), and was subsequently a CPUSA agent at the University of Chicago. Meyer theorised the project of National Review as a ...”

“... Moore, Ceri Richards, William Roberts, Josef Herman, David Bomberg, L.S. Lowry, George Fullard and Frank Auerbach, together with the Dutchman Friso ten Holt. Of these, only the enthusiastic review of Lowry is included in the new collection, which is overwhelmingly dominated by French-based artists.Francis Bacon, whose work Berger reviewed in the New Statesman ...”

“... group in a medium shot. By the time the bride has been called ‘voluptuous’, we are somehow close enough to see her eyelashes. On Fisher’s reading, the shift occurs because Whitman, as narrator, in stealth has supplanted the bridegroom and is inviting the reader to join him. But this need not follow if one supposes that the eye of the mind has a more ...”

“... in his presence as a ‘black bastard’. Harmondsworth is a ‘fast track’ centre, conveniently close to Heathrow: 99.6 per cent of the asylum claims considered there are rejected. The young man I spoke to believes – and he may well be right – that the high turnover ensures a profit for the private company that runs Harmondsworth. The company, United ...”

“... focus, but unable to yield anything but a fuzzy middle distance. He is certainly given to close observation of colourful characters and exotic scenes; indeed we acquire a much more solid sense of Chuck than of Rachel, and in one scene the immigrant bazaar that is Coney Island is pictured with a vividness never accorded Hans’s own Chelsea or ...”

“... his fellow countrymen’s propensity to declare, in the words of the Paul Anka song popularised by Frank Sinatra, ‘I did it my way.’ Thomas, however, construed these lines personally, as a challenge not only to his dithering, but also to his involuntary sense of poethood, in which choice, he insisted, played no part. ‘It is all very well,’ he wrote ...”

“... Homeresque epithets (every attractive woman is a ‘hardbody’ with ‘big tits’); sudden frank (and probably fake) declarations of emotion. Of course, the book also contains scenes of unparalleled repulsiveness: multiple rape-murders, dismemberments, disembowelments and the like. That several small logical impossibilities, scattered ...”

“... determinism whereby altitude becomes a ready predictor of state centralisation and reach. He comes close to this on quite a few occasions, but draws back. A second issue is that altitude may not be significant in and of itself, but be just one of many natural obstacles to the deploying of state technologies. Marshlands, deserts or even large bodies of water ...”

“... Memoir Club was formed neither the Age of Victoria nor Strachey’s youth were so mesmerisingly close. ‘Lancaster Gate’ is a compound of relief, regret and a certain tenderness, evoked in the opening by Strachey’s account of a recurring dream. In it he is once more in the house at Lancaster Gate. Asleep he is ‘positively delighted’ to be back even ...”

“... A Little Spasm and Whims promoted a Wildean cult of decadence, and were mocked by the naturalist Frank Norris in his novel The Octopus as ‘little toy magazines’. Symbolist-inspired bibelots appeared in Berlin, St Petersburg, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Alexandria and elsewhere. Around the same time, the market for publications was exploding. It’s estimated ...”

“... and ghost dances. He acquired the services of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Jean-Louis Barrault, Robert Frank, Ornette Coleman and Ravi Shankar. And he called his film Chappaqua. Ferlinghetti’s Aunt Emily removed him from the orphanage when she was taken on as French governess to the daughter of Presley Eugene Bisland, whose father-in-law founded Sarah Lawrence ...”

“... circles, and struck up friendships with Willem de Kooning, Allen Ginsberg, Yoko Ono, Robert Frank and the great figurative painter Bob Thompson, who shared his love of jazz. He was a pivotal influence on a student at Syracuse, Lou Reed; another close listener was a composition student at Juilliard, Philip Glass. Yet ...”