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“... is not,’ he wrote, firmly pegging out the territory of ‘fine art’, ‘a mechanical toy.’In Thomas Wolfe’s novel You Can’t Go Home Again, published posthumously in 1940, Calder appears, barely disguised, as Piggy Logan. Piggy is booked by a Manhattan socialite to perform at her party and duly turns up, a shambling figure with two bulging ...”

“... from drill bits for oil wells). Along with a third collaborator, a young art historian called Helen Winkler, Friedrich and de Menil saw that this new work had opened a structural gap in the art world – neither private nor public, its scale was beyond the means of individual collectors but also outside the domain of art museums – and they created Dia ...”

“... we would sink into a fundamentalist nightmare where verbal insult is injury, punishable as crime. Helen Benedict’s Virgin and Vamp and Gregory Matoesian’s Reproducing Rape are part of this assault: they seek to combat rape by reforming the way it is described. Although Benedict’s book is a journalist’s critique of rape coverage in the press and ...”

“... producing literary texts cunningly modelled on the work of some well-known author like Tennyson or Thomas Moore, which they then coolly claimed to be the lost original that the author had plagiarised. Maginn, who founded Fraser’s Magazine and died an alcoholic pauper, is said to have been familiar with Hebrew, Syriac, Sanskrit, Basque, Turkish, Assyrian and ...”

“... Moby Dick the whale or the man?’, ‘Willa Cather – did he write The Private Life of Helen of Troy?’ Ross, it was said, hardly ever read novels and was suspicious of poetry that aspired beyond light verse. He called music and painting the ‘two phoney arts’. He was contemptuous of all ‘fancy college men’. ‘Nobody’s going to make me ...”

“... the commonplace of maps, and hold yourself ready for adventure. The tourist class was invented by Thomas Cook when he assembled an excursion to the Paris Exposition in 1855. Tourists change their places in groups, live as comfortably as possible, take pleasure in gregariousness, obey injunctions, keep to the main roads, and fulfil plans made by tour-promoters ...”

“... for] blond Hans Hansen and blonde Inge Holm’ – the love of the outsider for the insider. Thomas Mann made Tonio dark and shy and half Latin American. Being Thomas Mann, he couldn’t make him Jewish, but as an expression of the story’s theme, he might just as well have done. After the war the adolescent Paul ...”

“... and he left no diaries or memoir. Further confusing matters was Crane’s first biographer, Thomas Beer, whose Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters (1923) had two virtues and one substantial demerit. The virtues were a carefully written introduction by Joseph Conrad, which treated Crane as a major writer, and Beer’s lively and vigorous ...”

“... only a writer of very High Modernist tendencies would take this remark as a compliment, but Thomas Mann certainly did, and it wasn’t even addressed to him. He found it in Harry Levin’s little book on Joyce, which he read in 1944. He was also much drawn to another sentence in the same work: ‘The best writing of our contemporaries is not an act of ...”

“... them back to an institution where they could be formally named. On 6 August 1852, Wallace’s ship Helen burned in the water, taking with it all of his precious Amazon collections. ‘How many times,’ he wrote later, ‘when almost overcome by the ague had I crawled into the forest and been rewarded by some unknown and beautiful species!’ How could he bear ...”

“... Joseph Priestley, were veterans of public discussion; others, like William Godwin, Coleridge, Helen Maria Williams and James Montgomery, were just setting out on careers that promised extraordinary achievements. They are unusual suspects because they were not organisers and activists, orators and pamphleteers who urged direct action in support of ...”

“... almost nothing and nowhere to live, since they had at once to leave the flat over the chemist shop Thomas Gissing had owned. A local collection in Wakefield made it possible for George and his two younger brothers to go to a Quaker school in Cheshire, and he never really lived in Wakefield again after that. Gissing regarded his father’s death as the most ...”

“... Material Place – ‘All men say “What” to me,’ Emily Dickinson wrote in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. She certainly mystified Higginson. He never entirely overcame his uneasiness about her odd, disjunctive words and bewildering epistolary tones and seven years into their correspondence still complained of being unable to get beyond the ...”

“... a sculptor and polo player who married an heiress to one of the great American fortunes; and Thomas Hitchcock, the most famous polo player in America, just back from a year at Oxford courtesy of the US Army. (Jay Gatsby enjoyed the same.) Rumsey was killed near Great Neck when he was thrown from an open roadster the day after Fitzgerald arrived in New ...”