“... you could. GRANDMOTHER: Would you boys like to take sandwiches to school or come home at noon? KING: I’ll get back into that palace, I know I will. SHEEP: Sure you will. The ‘New York School’ poets’ apparent independence from worldly concerns, their elaborate self-reference and slippery in-jokes, can make the world of the Cedar Tavern seem ...”

“... not conscious of the ownership of that diabolical arrangement called a stomach’ – and Charles Darwin’s friends understood that his uncontrollable retching and farting seriously limited his public life. Historical tradition had tended to associate indigestion and related ailments with certain sorts of people, but new democratic elements were ...”

“... obscene and enabled the rise of the bodily profane. Enter the Earl of Rochester, his remarks about Charles II’s sceptre and his prick being of a length, and his description of how in St James’s Park the ‘Poor pensive Lover in this place/Wou’d frigg upon his Mothers face/Whence Rowes of Mandrakes tall did rise/Whose lewd Topps Fuckt the very ...”

“... 1820. By this point, only around eighty American novels had been published, and the best known was Charles Brockden Brown’s macabre Edgar Huntley (1799), although Washington Irving’s collection of short stories and vignettes, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., would prove immensely popular the year Smith made his jibe. (Like Cooper after ...”

“... The horror!’ as his epigraph for that work. The implication is that Kurtz sees himself as the king who must die so that kingship may live and the land be saved from its sickness. Willard has stumbled out of the 20th century and into a timeless zone of magic and sacrifice, and the viewer of the film is looking at a kind of scrapbook of Modernist ...”

“... in the far west of Brittany. This was a legendary, Arthurian site, where the wicked daughter of King Gradlon once did away with a whole relay-team of dud candidates for her favours. It was visited and written about in the 19th century by Flaubert and by Hugo, and later by Segalen himself, in his first piece of real writing. He was found dead there two days ...”

“... the burning heat of a bridal suite in use,You’re the breasts of VenusYou’re King Kong’s penis,You’re self-abuse.As he moved through his days, Porter insisted he was more or less always at work writing songs, just not necessarily at the piano. ‘I’ve done lots of work at dinner, sitting between two bores. I can feign listening ...”

“... offer of a column on the Telegraph when he was proprietor. This was naturally embarrassing for Charles Moore, the editor, and annoying for the rest of the staff or, as Amiel puts it, a ‘small but vocal-in-corners group’ of them. Amiel sought the advice of William (Bill) Deedes, a former editor, a ‘seminal figure at the paper’ and all-round ...”

“... when it reached London: ‘Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801’ and ‘Presented by King George III’.On 27 September 1822, Jean-François Champollion wrote his Lettre à M. Dacier, presenting to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres his system for reading Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, derived from the Rosetta Stone. He finally set ...”

“... trying to form a provisional government under the regency of the Duchesse d’Orléans, the former king’s daughter-in-law, who was sitting calmly in the chamber. But the masses didn’t want a regency; they wanted revolution. Their presence swung the balance of power towards the radical opposition, which promptly announced the birth of the Second ...”

“... two further, later novels, not in the sequence, called O How the Wheel Becomes It and The Fisher King. The Powell offered to us here, in the pre-title list of his books, is the author of a nine-volume sequence of novels called A Dance to the Music of Time, and a further four-volume sequence called Books to Furnish a Room.The attraction of the slip is ...”

“... luminous look’. Risen from the pages of Enid Starkie’s Life, here was her hero of heroes, Charles Baudelaire, and he was staring right at her: ‘He wanted to impress himself on me – young clay takes the print better. And the message was totally cynical. It wasn’t a “follow me” message. It was a quizzical, satirical: “You too?”’This is ...”

“... lamented that Rousseau had died before discovering his ideal island. Swinburne wanted to be its king and drink ‘rapture of rest’. Temperatures avoid extremes; camellias bloom at Christmas. The very competitive mathematician and ocean-wave expert Sir James Lighthill swam the ten miles around Sark five times; on his sixth attempt, in 1998, he ruptured a ...”

“... and Claud was sent to school at Berkhamstead. The headmaster during the First World War was Charles Greene, father of Graham and a high-minded radical, and Cockburn first saw political violence on Armistice Day, when a drunken mob burst into the school accusing Greene (quite wrongly) of having been ‘anti-war’. But the experiences that followed were ...”

“... riddles of Roman times, Antonio de Guevara and the transmission of medieval tales to the age of Charles V, Montaigne, La Bruyère, Madame de Sévigné, Voltaire, to finish in Proust – all in 25 pages. In this procedure, which we could also call historical montage, the premium is always – to use a contrast that gives its title to the opening entry in ...”