“... to which Prince had converted around five years earlier. As so often happens in Gerard Manley Hopkins – whose ‘Epithalamion’ perhaps lurks in the hinterland of this poem – the religious meaning and the sensual details presented come to feel part of a complex balanced equation: the earnest efforts made to explain the war in relation to God’s ...”

“... of Beckett and Albee, a two-week course in painting from Elaine de Kooning, Lightnin’ Hopkins in concert and a festival of poetry featuring Kenneth Koch, W.D. Snodgrass and Robert Bly. Most fun of all, Barthelme organised an exhibition, New American Artefacts: The Ugly Show, which included all sorts of bits and pieces he’d found in junk ...”

“... trade. He damns with faint praise (of Elsie Elizabeth Phare’s The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins he withers, ‘Miss Phare has written a book of 150 pages about a major poet’), charms as he disclaims (reviewing books on architecture: ‘I’d better say at once that I know nothing more about architecture than any other member of the professional ...”

“... Ernest Haycox vied with Dostoevsky and Faulkner, and the Penguin Poets edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins arrived in the same box as a little book on sex technique called Getting the Most out of Love. The former had been assiduously annotated by a very fine hand using a blue-inked fountain pen while the latter had been studied by someone with very large ...”

“... You​ ought to be in a kindergarten,’ a Canadian nurse exclaimed to David Jones, aged twenty, awaiting transfer home in July 1916 after being wounded in Mametz Wood. Even a decade later, photographs show a wary child or an understudy for an adult. Prudence Pelham, the staunchest of his extended female fellowship, described him as ‘completely unsexed ...”

“... the same time accusing me.’ Meanwhile, a longtime friend and ally of Rubio, former Congressman David Rivera, is facing a series of ethics proceedings, the Washington Post reports, for ‘routinely billing the state for travel and other expenses while paying himself back out of campaign accounts when he was a state legislator’. In 2005, Rivera and Rubio ...”

“... much time in the city of Cluj, where she had formed a passionate friendship with the historian David Prodan. The Securitate meanwhile had decided that with a name like Verdery she must be an ethnic Hungarian (quite wrong: the family roots were French), and therefore had been planted to encourage subversion among the disaffected Magyar minority in ...”

“... art history in the 1980s and 1990s. Bois was a central voice in this debate, first at Johns Hopkins (1983-91), then at Harvard (1991-2005), and finally at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, but that story is, for the most part, beyond the scope of An Oblique Autobiography. How can an autobiography be oblique? One way is to present its parts ...”

“... of Racial Capitalism in South Africa’, by the South African historians Martin Legassick and David Hemson. In the late 1970s, the official position of the UN’s International Labour Organisation was that the policy of apartheid was in direct conflict with economic growth, and that growth would eventually undermine and force an end to ...”

“... on to Coleridge, Chaucer, Fielding and Petronius, and then had a go at Proust, Mann, Boswell and David Hume. He took a turn through French literature then doubled back to the English Romantics. He read Cicero and Virgil, Gibbon and Congreve, Goethe and Nestroy, Machiavelli and Hobbes, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas ...”

“... a man with wild red hair (looking like Léonide Massine in The Red Shoes) who brings Livesey and David Niven tea in the country house where some amateurs are rehearsing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This house seems to be set on a series of steps which, though the film was shot in the studio, relates it to Hardwick Hall and also to the dream sequences that ...”

“... not one joy but what some berk’llWant it ringed wi’ a red circle.That could be David Hockney moaning about the nanny state – and there’s a connection of sorts (both were born into working-class Yorkshire homes in 1937), as there is with Alan Bennett (born in Leeds in 1934). Harrison’s mode is more aggrieved than Bennett’s but the ...”

“... reveals, indeed, a remarkable level of social organisation. Recent work by, among others, David Levine has shown the likely economic developments that led to the lowering of the age of marriage and the relaxation of sexual morals in the 18th century. These changes are attributed to the rise of ‘proto-industry’ – in particular, to the ...”

“... seems to reveal something about me that I’d rather not look at. It carries what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls ‘the inscape’ out. ‘Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind,’ Confucius said. Graphology, as I’m sure you know, is the study of handwriting as a clue to character analysis. Hard to believe it isn’t a good clue.If ...”

“... lateness – Colin Farrell recited ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the last two years of her life, when he was in his thirties and she was in her late seventies, Farrell had become one of Taylor’s closest friends. They met in an LA hospital in 2009 (she was there for a heart procedure and he for the birth of his ...”