“... it could have been a tram.9 March. I am reading Colm Tóibín’s New Ways to Kill Your Mother. Of Hart Crane’s suicide he writes: ‘He walked on deck … took off his coat, folded it neatly over the railing (not dropping it on deck) … then suddenly he vaulted over the railing and jumped into the sea.’ This was in 1932. At Calverley on the outskirts of ...”

“... singularity. So Hemingway ‘stems ultimately from the Emersonian reliance on the god within’. Hart Crane ‘keeps to his lifelong programme of so transuming his wealth of forerunners as to make them seem belated and himself their ever-early if sacrificial replacement’. Wallace Stevens, whom I have always read as a poet of light and of things emerging ...”

“... Shakespeare turns chronicle into history, then history into drama, and then – in the superb Henry IV plays – historical drama into something almost like myth: free-standing, undocumented and legendary works of art. Two hundred years before the novel emerged in Europe, and psychology became a dominant language of experience, Shakespeare brought about ...”

“... mesmerising: W.H. Auden believed that Eliot had had a mystical vision when he was a young child, Hart Crane was convinced that he was secretly gay, while Delmore Schwartz was a fount of scurrilous stories about Eliot’s sex life, which, according to Schwartz, included a relationship with the Jewish woman referred to as Rachel née Rabinovitch in ‘Sweeney ...”

“... first issue of transition of 1927 included paintings by Ernst and poems by the American Modernist Hart Crane, the French Surrealists Robert Desnos and Philippe Soupault and the German Expressionist Georg Trakl (in translations from French and German by Eugene Jolas). A decade later, the last issue was still churning out Work in Progress, now alongside work by ...”

“... of the editors at Partisan Review, who began publishing her criticism: Richard Wright, Faulkner, Hart Crane, the Goncourts – Hardwick could turn her hand to almost anything. When Philip Rahv met her, he was struck by her gumption. He asked her what she thought of Diana Trilling: ‘Not much.’ ‘I weighed about ten pounds then,’ Hardwick ...”

“... remarking to various friends on the pleasures of Mrs Carlyle’s, Keats’s and Coleridge’s and Henry James’s letters, and the depressing nature of Hart Crane’s and Edna St Vincent Millay’s correspondence. ‘A friend of Lota’s,’ Bishop wrote in 1970, ‘burned all my letters to Lota, which Lota had carefully ...”

“... in the equally massive Complete Letters, edited by Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, and Rupert Hart-Davis. Rowland has a whole chapter on the relations between Willie and Oscar, ‘Wilde about the boy’, which he begins with a warning: ‘It must be emphasised from the outset that, in the absence of information of a more tangible kind, what follows in the ...”

“... I think.’ Tite Street was the family home; he did not return there. The spectre of Wilde haunted Henry James in the first two months of 1895, and James’s correspondence gives us a much richer sense than Wilde’s does of what the opening of a new play could mean at the turn of the 19th century. ‘Who shall deny the immense authority of the theatre,’ he ...”

“... in films and on television. It is true that a number of influential mavericks – from Nabokov and Henry Miller to William Burroughs, James Baldwin, Philip Roth and the Beats – had been chipping away at the old taboos. But it still took courage to challenge the stultifying pieties of middlebrow culture. Being a woman didn’t help. (Does it ever?) Over the ...”

“... worst anxieties to him. His father was a shoe salesman. In his early forties, after winning an O. Henry Award, Cheever went to see his mother. He reported the following exchange: ‘I read in the newspaper that you won a prize.’ ‘Yes, mother, I didn’t tell you about it because it wasn’t terribly important to me.’ ‘No, it wasn’t to me ...”

“... His ghost had joined the other ghosts haunting the halls of Union College, including the ghost of Henry James’s father, who had briefly been a student there, and Henry James’s grandfather, who had helped to fund the college and whose portrait hung in the president’s house. When her correspondence with Yeats ...”

“... some way influenced the nation’s life’, this would require the inclusion not only of Henry Ford and Walt Disney, but also of the CEOs of most big American corporations in the past century. This is one of the several ways in which one runs up against the limitations, for the purposes of historical understanding, of taking individual lives and ...”

“... attack. ‘He’s either a great fraud or a genius,’ Clare Boothe Luce reported to her husband Henry, owner of Time magazine. ‘Probably both.’ Hearing his plans, Admiral Thomas Hart, commander of the grandly-named US Asiatic Fleet, wrote to his wife: ‘Douglas is, I think, no longer altogether sane ... he may not ...”

“...  Henry James​’s novel The Princess Casamassima, which dramatises the world of stray revolutionaries in London in the 1880s, depends on energy coming from opposites. The novel’s protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, appreciates beauty and feels excluded from the world of privilege around him. He lives an interior life ...”