“... who presented him as a pompous, psychologically damaged second-rater. Lewis’s biography was no fun to read, but it was interesting for what it revealed about responses to the unfashionable. It was written by a lapsed admirer, and showed exactly what happens when a reader realises that he no longer likes what he ...”

“... Or if the coming limbo will sentence the dead to a cinema purgatorio of guilty memories with no beginning and no end; a microclimate of mephitic fumes so pernicious that tired eyes struggle to form a pattern from writhing shapes on a dirty sheet. But whatever manifests when the hour comes – perhaps all of the above ...”

“... had merely ushered him into an elegantly appointed cul-de-sac. As the queen’s husband he had no job and no authority. The title of prince consort was not granted until 1857 and he never received a peerage. He was known personally to hardly anyone in the country except Victoria and public opinion was initially wary of ...”

“... coming and going all though the B-movie, the advertisements, the newsreel and the main feature. No one dreamed of starting a novel on page 72, or dropping into the Old Vic mid-Hamlet (though perhaps music hall worked the same way; was that the origin of the movie habit?), and not even the smallest child would let anyone ...”

“... fabulous wealth and bad behaviour that persisted well after his death. In the late 17th century, John Aubrey (who was good on anecdotes though not quite so strong on truth) recorded that he once got one of Elizabeth’s maids of honour up against a tree. She protested with ‘Will you undoe me? Nay, sweet Sir Walter! Sweet Sir Walter! Sir Walter! At last as ...”

“... It is the fate​ of some artists,’ John Ashbery once remarked, ‘and perhaps the best ones, to pass from unacceptability to acceptance without an intervening period of appreciation.’ For a long time – more than forty years in fact – there seemed no danger that this fate would befall J ...”

“... Mary Patterson, married Lewis Sheridan Leary in 1858. The following year, Leary was recruited by John Brown for his suicidal raid on Harpers Ferry, and the bullet-riddled shawl that was eventually returned to Mary was in due course used as a blanket for the infant Langston (a middle name – he was baptised James, after his father). Mary’s next ...”

“... Calton, an area known for the Barras flea market and the Barrowland Ballroom, once a famous dance hall and now a popular music venue. I had been told that in its first four months, the Thistle oversaw 2010 injections and prevented thirty overdoses. ‘Do you know how many times you’ve used here, Ryan?’ Arthur Jarvis, a social worker, asked. ‘Two hundred ...”

“... titles at that level – he attributes this partly to living in Ireland, a country with next to no tennis history or infrastructure – and instead of turning pro accepted a tennis scholarship to Berkeley, which he describes as ‘a plausible each-way bet in a zero-sum world’. Four years later, in 2005, he started playing on the lowest tier of ...”

“... frontispiece of Nicholas Nickleby when it appeared as a book in October that year. But there is no evidence that Dickens ever turned left on entering the portico and strolled around the National Gallery. He would have known that as wall furniture in fashionable houses Old Master paintings were almost as popular as silk hangings and looking-glasses. The ...”

“... than Faulkner (O’Connor compared her ‘one-cylinder syntax’ unfavourably to his), but it’s no advertisement for Southern refinement. Sally Poker is desperate to have her grandfather appear in full battle dress at her graduation so that ‘they’ – not anyone in particular, ‘just all the upstarts who had turned the world on its head and unsettled ...”

“... Later he would write about how money leaked away, slippery as mercury: ‘Money in every pocket, no wallet, no clip/I just bunch it up and stuff it.’ Cash for Corso was always a dangerously occult commodity. ‘Money,’ he acknowledged, ‘doesn’t come with instructions.’ Corso of course is the other ‘drinky ...”

“... to the defence of a great and loyal Englishman of the old style. ‘I became Public Cultural Enemy No 1 over the Tennyson preface,’ Auden wrote to a friend, ‘a little comic seeing that T is one of my favourite poets.’ Auden’s peppery remark is now more than half a century old but it remains one of the best-known things said about Tennyson and keeps a ...”

“... one after another, without qualification or hierarchy. Parataxis, the late-explainers call it. No flimflam. Don’t wink at the camera until the camera winks back. Ben Watson, a contributor, like Perloff, to Removed for Further Study (a clutch of bright-eyed and slightly foxed Raworth exegetists, decent folk who are well aware that they are probably ...”

“... admired Gordon too, and then pledging himself to the cause of peace in the Middle East – it was no surprise that the boldest liar of all came out on top. Fortune favours the brave. In politics, it is tempting to think that a lie is a lie is a lie, and since everyone is at it, all that matters is what you can get away with. But that is to do Tony Blair a ...”