“... pivotal events of the century, a setting-up of sides for the Second World War. Philby, along with Stephen Spender, Hugh Gaitskell, Naomi Mitch-ison, the American journalist John Gunther and many others, was horrified to see the Austrian regular army shelling the workers’ flats in Karl-Marx-Stadt, and readily agreed with his new Communist girlfriend, Litzi ...”

“... thought a good idea to get someone from the Trump campaign, given that in July 2016 there was a small but not insignificant chance he might end up as president. The person who turned up was Carter Page. None of the people I spoke to seemed entirely sure who he was or what he was doing there. He sat through two days of discussions about lobbying and ...”

“... the bus-traveller’s equivalent of the zigzag walk (first left, first right ad infinitum) that Stephen Graham had earlier recommended, in The Gentle Art of Tramping (1926), as a way of manoeuvring the modern city into new patterns of disclosure. Starting at Victoria Coach Station, Goldring boards a bus that is about to depart for Essex, a county he has ...”

“... by the week, his marriage in tatters. He finished a highly psychologised critical biography of Stephen Crane. He replaced Roethke for a term at the University of Washington in Seattle; lectured briefly at the University of Vermont; met Jarrell, without any fur flying. In 1952 he spent the spring term at the University of Cincinnati, a generally successful ...”

“... seven years earlier. They were an unsavoury bunch, who all had experience of committing fraud in small teams; Frizer, as if going down to posterity as the killer of a great Elizabethan playwright weren’t ignominy enough, had also been a property-speculator in Basingstoke. Of Marlowe’s recent biographers, only Constance Kuriyama is prepared to accept the ...”

“... feeling ‘lost in dead tissue’ as he later put it, and increasingly frustrated by the small-mindedness of the Teddy Boy contingent. He and Westwood relaunched the shop as Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, then as SEX, and then Seditionaries, each incarnation associated with an increasingly confrontational look inspired respectively by motorbike ...”

“... When Schwartz appeared one day carrying Hart Crane’s The Bridge, she was appalled that such a small book cost three dollars. Even summer camp offered no respite: Rose came along to help out and humiliated her son by following him around.In 1931, Schwartz went to the University of Wisconsin. In his excellent biography Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an ...”

“... in the City and making new selves for themselves. But Ronnie seemed happy to stick with the same small group of friends in South London. Some time in 1983, his girlfriend broke with him and took up with a guy they both knew called Coxy. Ronnie couldn’t understand it – the guy turned out to be no good – but he found another girl, Sharon, ‘a girl with ...”

“... Nancy Astor, a nightmare we would all want to be woken from. Too much money and too much mother; small wonder that Isaiah Berlin decided David Astor was ‘a neurotic, muddled, complicated, politically irresponsible, unhappy adventurer, permanently resentful of somebody or something … a typical poor little American rich boy’. But on the evidence of ...”

“... was surely there to be read, but they would not allow it to be heard. The Commission had announced Stephen Foster when they were actually playing Wagner. Surely, critics who had followed the true score should have pointed that out?A good question, but perhaps one that only literature can answer. ‘Critics’ – the press, the academics, the think-tankers ...”

“... is concerned. They turn the sickle side of the moon to [the] world: the globe to the other.’ To Stephen Spender she wrote in more violent terms, suggesting not so much self-absorption as self-demolition: ‘I dont think you can get your words to come till youre almost unconscious; and unconsciousness only comes when youve been beaten and broken and gone ...”

“... prints, photographs of photographs. In the Zone there are essentially two types of pitch: small photographs (such as these) or very large photographs, such as those by Marc Atkins in the Foundry, on the corner of Great Eastern Street.* Both are self-conscious, uneasy about the urban landscape, careful to avoid the bathos of head-on romanticism. An art ...”

“... there were non-SPG officers ahead of him in Beachcroft Avenue. Cass noted drily that, after ‘no small investigation’, he had found this was untrue. Here is one of the exchanges between Murray and the interviewing officer: [Murray] was seen on 17.5.79 at 8.30 p.m. I said to him: ‘This is a very serious business. I understand you made a 991 ...”

“... Bellow has read and taught all his life, allows Buck Mulligan in Ulysses to give a comic twist to Stephen Dedalus’s similar pretensions that he is of divine origins and divinely inspired: I’m the queerest young fellow that you ever heard. My mother’s a jew, my father’s a bird. With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree. So here’s to disciples and ...”

“... comprised of stories that were previously collected in editions by Black Sparrow and other small presses, and Welcome Home, a little uncut ruby of a memoir that is appearing for the first time. Left unfinished when Berlin died in 2004, it is extended to a respectable length by a selection of letters, mostly to her friends Ed and Helene Dorn. The lack ...”