“... 850 pubs, went for £239 million. A template had been established. In 1999 they teamed up with Philip Green to buy the retail firm Sears, which owned a number of high-street clothing chains and a mail-order business. These were all sold within six months, making the brothers and Green some £250 million, twice the amount they had put into the deal. Another ...”

“... Keen’s cheddar? Perfect. Then I went upstairs and read Emmanuel Carrère’s biography of Philip K. Dick for half an hour or so.† Then I tried to sleep. There are quite a large number of books about how to get a good night’s sleep, and good ‘sleep hygiene’ in general, and not a single one of them recommends a combination of late-night ...”

“... to pay the rent. T.S. Eliot had the bank and subsequently his job as a publisher; William Carlos Williams had his medical practice; Wallace Stevens had his insurance office; Philip Larkin had his obligations as a university librarian. Auden had prose. Lots of it: several of his New Yorker reviews weigh in at well over ...”

“... poet with atrophied tastes, he can expect a commission to do something tasteful on Glynn Williams. The Commander has become the ashy residue of Neo-Romanticism, out there in the Fens, a John Piper with backbone, silhouetted against lowering skies, fretting to escape the inconvenience of some vulgar stiff and get at those rough flint churches. ...”

“... historians should consult his remarks on X, Catacomb, and the New English Weekly edited by Philip Mairet, a man of integrity and enthusiasm whom Sisson affectionately evokes: ‘his eyes would light up as visibly as the bulbs on a pin-table, as the ideas rattled round.’ The bohemian world of poets, painters and little magazines, the ‘natural ...”

“... a time that must seem remote from the present. Nothing testifies more strikingly to the truth in Philip Larkin’s poem ‘MCMXIV’ – though its terms are rather different, except perhaps for the reference to ‘dark-clothed children at play/Called after kings and queens’ – than Sorley’s letters. ‘Never such innocence again,’ indeed, so long as ...”

“... this kind of music’; the examiner was not, the editors go out of their way to assure us, Vaughan Williams. ‘He was full of ideas, his own and others’,’ they said; he was offensively clever. When he was still in his early twenties people started complaining that he didn’t seem to be fulfilling his youthful promise. Britten was the son of a Lowestoft ...”

“... she’d had a promiscuous whirl on Gay Street, but she was engaged in a serious affair with Philip Rahv (‘the most Levantine lover!’) when she fell into bed with Wilson and somehow felt obliged to marry him. ‘Of all the reasons Mary McCarthy presents for marrying Edmund Wilson,’ Brightman says, carrying through her theory of the suppressed ...”

“... result – a horse-drawn harvester set off against a silver sea – over half a page. Clough Williams-Ellis stretched Tyneham’s view of Worbarrow Bay over the end-papers of his passionately-argued conservationist volume Britain and the Beast. There could scarcely have been a more evocative picture of an England that, in the Thirties, was endangered but ...”

“... the United States. ‘History begins for us with murder and enslavement,’ wrote William Carlos Williams, ‘not with discovery.’ Rogin contends that the slave system generated in whites – and not only in the slave-owners themselves – a counter-subversive mentality, a constant anxiety about a social and sexual threat that needed to be combated ...”

“... Richard Cobb, often in a class as small as an early Christian cenacle, was to be taught life,’ Philip Mansel recalled. ‘He did not simply describe, he transformed himself into a farmer overeating merely for the pleasure of depriving Parisians of their food; a revolutionary who had marinated in envy all his life and was using his position on the Committee ...”

“... finesse and a military-trained marksman. He had been at Reed College in Portland with Snyder and Philip Whalen, a formidable Pacific Rim triumvirate of youthful poets and seekers. Heavily dosed on Gertrude Stein, and fired up by a chance encounter with William Carlos Williams, Welch was confirmed in his destiny as an ...”

“... were laughing and gay.’ Another first-class passenger couldn’t gel his cabin door open. Norris Williams, a tennis player, heard him call out, put his shoulder to the door, and broke it down. An indignant steward, Martha Eustis Stevenson remembered afterwards, ‘threatened to have him arrested for defacing the beautiful ship’. Lower down in the boat, in ...”

“... were unfurled in the national press, while recollections of the happy times of Elgar and Vaughan Williams encouraged proposals that after Sir Michael Tippett, the next candidate for composer-laureate and international standard-bearer should be Tavener. As soon as a young or not-so-young composer in the post-Górecki era has been convincingly reified as an ...”

“... Crisis was underwritten by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and A. Philip Randolph and George Schuyler’s Messenger had the support of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Yeats’s magazines Beltaine and Samhain were issued to provide publicity and explanatory material for performances at the Irish Literary Theatre and the ...”