“... the Michigan prison system. He claims to have killed again on the day of his release. (Lucas and Charles Manson, incidentally, were both made to attend their first day at school dressed as girls.) To read up on serial murders is to sup full of horrors, and also to sup full of explanations. ‘Psychopathic dissociation’, acute, chronic and paranoid ...”

“... and exact knowledge of Eliot is in some ways less advanced here than in, say, the collection which Allen Tate edited and which Ackroyd draws on, T.S. Eliot: The Man and His Work (1967). For the contributors to that volume, among them Stephen Spender, Herbert Read and Bonamy Dobrée, were all allowed to quote from Eliot’s correspondence. Compare Ackroyd with ...”

“... 1967, at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. Surrounded by poets – Giuseppe Ungaretti, Allen Ginsberg, Ingeborg Bachmann, Rafael Alberti, John Berryman, Charles Tomlinson, Stephen Spender – we felt en famille. Paz and I and our wives drove to Assisi to see Giotto’s frescos, wandered about the Chiostro dei ...”

“... Saba translated by Derek Mahon, Ungaretti by Patrick Creagh, Maria Luisa Spaziani by Beverly Allen. But many others are more limited. In Biographia Literaria Coleridge illustrates the workings of metaphor with some made-up lines which do not pretend to be poetry but nonetheless go through poetical motions: they are ‘an illustration’ but not ‘an ...”

“... what has been done in his name. Marxism is not Karl Marx, it is true, any more than Darwinism is Charles Darwin. You may not be astonished by this thought. ‘What neither his enemies nor his disciples are willing to acknowledge is the most obvious yet startling of all his qualities: that this mythical ogre and saint was a human being.’ Perhaps such an ...”

“... their son. The séances were so successful that her fiancé’s father, a French general, invited Charles Richet, a professor of physiology at the Sorbonne who was well known for his interest in psychic matters, to attend them; Richet soon declared himself fully persuaded that Béraud was genuine. Not long afterwards, Marthe Béraud confessed to trickery. She ...”

“... has traditionally been mocked (even by critics now as prehistoric-looking themselves as Walter Allen) as the epitome of middlebrow philistinism – on a par with the Janeite who reads Austen every year to relish her ‘wit’. This, however, is the company Wall prefers. Wall takes it for granted that Trollope must be swallowed as the boa takes the buffalo ...”

“... taken upstairs by Henry James Sr to bless his three-month-old son William. It was, as Gay Wilson Allen remarks in his biography of James, ‘a prophetic event for the future philosopher of Pragmatism’.) ‘shakespeare,’ Emerson says, ‘will never be made by the study of Shakespeare,’ and he warns on another occasion that ‘meek young men grow up in ...”

“... to the secular as well as religious needs of their congregations. The social investigator Charles Booth thought they were ‘lenient judges of the frailties that are not sins, and of the disorder that is not crime’. In 1843, the temperance advocate Father Mathew administered the pledge to some penitents who were actually ‘in a state of ...”

“... trade publishers, he became a pre-eminent influence on all sorts of American writers: the young Allen Ginsberg paid him homage and copied his style, while Robert Lowell, for example, looked to Williams for a freer, more democratic manner than his rivals could offer. Though he remains an acquired taste in Britain, Williams’s position in American poetry, at ...”

“... pages’ photographed from a copy in the House of Commons Library. The publication coincides with Allen Reddick’s impressive volume on the Dictionary in the Cambridge Studies in Publishing and Printing History. This traces the Dictionary’s history from Johnson’s Grub Street beginnings to the end of his life, when Johnson left some revisions in a copy of ...”

“... most accomplished work. And then, in 1991, there was American Psycho. I’m having drinks with Charles Murphy at Rusty’s to fortify myself before making an appearance at Evelyn’s Christmas party. I’m wearing a four-button double-breasted wool and silk suit, a cotton shirt with button-down collar by Valentino Couture, a patterned silk tie by Armani ...”

“... splashed all over the papers, having visited a phrenologist in the company of the glamorous Mrs Allen, ‘wife of rich ex-MP’. According to the Express, they had had their heads read in a joint session at Ludgate Circus – but surely, it was implied, there had been more to it than that. The Duke of Gloucester attracted no scandal, but was dull to the ...”

“... Mayor Ed Koch sang and danced in an afro wig in 1980, sparking a walkout by Harlem’s congressman Charles Rangel. Happy to push boundaries to their extreme, Rudy Giuliani in his fourth year in office appeared onstage in full drag with the cast of the musical Victor/Victoria, a jaw-dropping moment that fed his bottomless appetite for shocking people …But few ...”

“... joined a group called Pat T. Cake and His Mighty Panthers. Soul music was coming into its own. Ray Charles was recording for Atlantic Records; Sam Cooke had left the Soul Stirrers; James Brown was touring with his Famous Flames. But Otis Redding wasn’t a soul singer yet. Billed as Otis ‘Rockin’ Redding or ‘Rockhouse Redding’, he sang rock and roll ...”