“... 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 ...”

“... felt at once more imperative and more difficult to imagine and discuss. I want to ask whether the small world of psychoanalysis has anything even implicitly to offer – or even to say – on this subject, mindful of how grandiose and strangely irrelevant psychoanalysis can sometimes seem when applied, beyond the consulting room, to political life. To resist ...”

“... Carpenter’s excellent life of Auden has a nice turn of phrase in recounting the moment when Stephen Spender, arrived in an Oxford of the later Twenties which was pervaded by the legend of Auden, at last met his fellow undergraduate and ‘found the reality just as remarkable as that legend’. The story appears to have come from Spender, himself ...”

“... are on their own fact-finding mission to planet Earth. The question is whether the encounter of small with large will reveal anything of interest, or if aliens are merely a version of us, and here a version of elsewhere.Flaubert admired Candide extravagantly (even claiming to have translated it into English) because it showed that the con brio of a story ...”

“... guilt-imbued and looking for art to heal the wounds of religion, already a version of Stephen Dedalus? By the end of the book, in self-imposed exile, he’s even answering to the name of Stephen.Other ambitious 20th-century American writers have tried to find a way of synthesising the internal perspective and ...”

“... St Paul’s’ (a building which he completed in 1710). Hill’s poem lives locally in these small, self-delighting verbal graces that can have the air of deft contrivance or happy accident, while its more momentous and even ominous compulsions work themselves out on the grand scale, as though occupying some other part of the poet’s mind. ‘Again I ...”

“... of its director in Life, led to an invitation to work for John Huston. He wrote an adaptation of Stephen Crane’s story ‘The Blue Hotel’, which Huston did not use but liked enough to give him another project, The African Queen. Later Agee collaborated with Charles Laughton on the screenplay of Davis Grubb’s extraordinary novel about the discovery of ...”

“... ennobling effects of liberty. One phrase in Milton’s History of Britain – ‘from obscure and small to grow eminent and glorious commonwealths’ – appears to be taken directly from Sallust’s rendition of a speech by Cato in which he tells the Senate not to ‘suppose that it was by arms that our forefathers raised our republic from obscurity to ...”

“... He was born rather higher in the social scale than H.G. Wells, for his father was the manager of a small factory which had been built up, from artisan beginnings, by his own father. The family was quite prosperous, and Carr went to Merchant Taylor’s, where he shone. Even as a child, he was a somewhat unpopular figure, for he did not like fools, and his ...”