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“... in chalk. In trying to write this biography, the narrator is inspired by the first biography of William Blake, by Alexander Gilchrist, which was completed by Gilchrist’s widow after his death: ‘She had to see if she could imitate his voice.’ The narrator is writing to keep up ‘a topic of conversation’ with Enriqueta. The book’s Spanish title, La ...”

“... summer, and a single further number in May 1729. It was written by Jonathan Swift and his friend Thomas Sheridan, a clergyman, schoolteacher and man of letters, and grandfather of the playwright. It includes at least two of Swift’s important works, his critique of the Beggar’s Opera in No 3, and a reprint of the ‘Short View of the State of ...”

“... Jacobean tragedy, but there were enough of them and of attempted assassinations – the murders of William the Silent and Henri III and Henri IV of France; the attempt to poison Queen Elizabeth; the numerous plots, in both his kingdoms, on the life of James VI and I – for threats and rumours of regicide to place nations on recurrent high alert. In life and ...”

“... and estimation, whether the message couldn’t have been delivered a little more crisply. Thomas Carlyle certainly thought so: the poem, he declared, was ‘all made out of an Old Bailey story that might have been told in ten lines and only wants forgetting’. It is not in fact that easy to tell the story in ten lines – Browning’s most concise ...”

“... a first bibliography, and respectful salutations from across the literary scene: Dylan Thomas emerged best from the exercise, warmly praising ‘a wide and deep poet’ before adding, impishly: ‘Congratulations on Auden’s seventieth birthday.’ He did indeed seem senior beyond his years. The issue had a double-page Faber advert, on one side of ...”

“... the spirit world. When, in 1905, during a séance in Boston, a medium spoke in the presence of Mrs William James of a communication from a ‘Mary’ to Henry, the message was dutifully passed on to Henry James in England, who wrote that it was his ‘dear Mother’s unextinguished consciousness breaking through the interposing vastness of the universe and ...”

“... it was supported by the best team available: Clark Gable, Cedric Gibbons sets, Adrian gowns, William Daniels lighting, accommodating directors. (Who wouldn’t be accommodating? As Crawford pointed out, the star was sleeping with the boss.) It seems appropriate that little Eva Duarte left home for the bright lights of Buenos Aires after seeing Riptide ...”

“... is a mystery –‘magic’ in Starr’s terms – but its concreteness is not in question. When William Cowper wrote, in support of the anti-slavery sugar boycott of the late 18th century, ‘No nostrum, planters say, is half so good/To make fine sugar, as a Negro’s blood,’ he was being materially specific. The blood of enslaved blacks ...”

“... bad-trip imagery, like the cut-up technique Bowie used to compose the lyrics, is borrowed from William Burroughs. The title song is introduced with a toe-curling yell of: ‘This ain’t rock’n’roll, this is genocide!’ But that’s soon forgotten in the gloriously overlong, overripe, decadent mess of anarchic guitars, squelching horns and exuberant ...”

“... sufferer from the complaint of Flaubert. The latter stood away from life as from a leprosy. And Thomas Mann, like Flaubert, feels vaguely that he has in him something finer than ever physical life revealed.’ Lawrence’s heroic vitalism, his belief that ‘physical life’ is the highest value we can know, includes a refusal of what he saw as the ...”

“... his occasional grudging acceptance of a community of interest. With Anne came the King’s doctor William Butts, ‘whose unobtrusive services to the evangelical cause played a key part in the course of Henrician reformation’. This Boleyn-Butts axis often appears in this book competing vigorously for limelight with ...”

“... face on the narrow green sofa. The expression is childlike: ‘It was the look he recorded in William Dorrit’s face in death; it was the look which he saw in the faces of the corpses on view in the Paris Morgue. This connection between death and infancy is one that had haunted him; sleep, repose, death, infancy, innocence, oblivion are the words that ...”

“... Indeed, there occurs in it a passing reference to ‘the raw material for half-finished books on William Blake and Customs in Common’, works long since published. From the mid-Eighties mountainous illness surrounded Edward, from which he nonetheless retrieved the last big works: Customs in Common (1991), which traced a disappearing culture back over ground ...”

“... their say. There are essays from many of the old Partisan crowd, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, William Barrett, Philip Rahv; a compassionate reminiscence from Harry Levin, who was much abused by Schwartz when they were neighbours in Cambridge in 1940; there are Lowell’s elegies and Berryman’s Dreamsongs, and even an awkward commemoration on his The ...”

“... are an aviatrix third wife, a sodden poet Warren Penfield, an ‘industrial consultant’ Thomas Crapo (alias ‘Tommy the Emperor’) and Crapo’s girl, Clara. Joe is taken on as a servant, only to elope after a few months with Clara. On the run, he gets a job in a Bennett factory. There is a strike; the strike is broken; so are some of Joe’s ...”