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“... of Sylvia Plath. That seemed correct, a spontaneous piece of performance art. I had heard Heather Clark, the author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, speak at a conference on biography the previous spring. I thought then that she seemed too normal for the task. I chafed against the setting down of the facts, as if they could yet be ...”

“... an exchange in the New Statesman soon after Housman’s death, now conveniently reprinted in Christopher Ricks’s Housman volume in the series ‘20th-century Views’, drew attention to many weaknesses: but if one can accept them on their own terms, a fair number of his poems surely stand up. Eliot, whose surprisingly sympathetic review of The Name and ...”

“... but wasn’t apparently much of a mother to any of them. She was a drinker, and a lover of Clark Gable’s. Vidal isn’t entirely forthcoming about his mother and father: his parents’ lovers, it seems, are more important for him, and count as evidence that everyone is so very closely connected with everyone else in the US, and so very closely ...”

“... will also translate the last volume, but no announcement has been made about the intervening ones. Christopher Prendergast’s six-volume edition for Penguin (2002) is still in print and much read. The translators there are Lydia Davis, James Grieve, Mark Treharne, John Sturrock, Carol Clark, Peter Collier and Ian ...”

“... English Protestantism into an amiable masquerade. Davie’s Essays in Dissent brings together his Clark Lectures for 1976 and his Ward-Phillips Lectures for 1980, adding seven more pieces on related topics, notably ‘A Day with the DNB’, ‘Dissenters and “Antiquity” ’ and ‘Disaffection of the Dissenters under George III’. The book adds up to the ...”

“... interviewer as well, with a varied roster of guests including the directors Walter Hill and Larry Clark, the actresses Anne Heche and Illeana Douglas, and the uncontainable Kanye West. His conversations with fellow novelists and screenwriters are among the best I’ve heard, insider sessions of literary shoptalk that discuss the mechanics of the trade instead ...”

“... that you have an unquestioning belief in ‘the hidden mechanisms of a sovereign self’, as Christopher Clark puts it; to sense your own partiality for the anecdotal. But I still think it’s dangerous to spend too much time with the dead. Rising from my desk late one evening, I am suddenly confronted with a scene. I see myself pulling back my ...”

“... Nicholas Scott has consoled himself since his departure from office with a consultancy with Clark and Smith Industries, whose products include many aimed at the disabled, for whom Scott was the responsible minister when in office. John McGregor (afterwards Lord McGregor) has rejoined merchant bankers Hill Samuel since his departure from the Transport ...”

“... long before Courtauld’s funding was due to end, supporters of the institute, including Kenneth Clark and Lee, decided to approach Rab Butler, the secretary of state for education, who happened to be Courtauld’s son-in-law. His first idea was to attach the Warburg to the Victoria and Albert Museum, financed by a grant in aid, a proposal rejected by a ...”

“... He could have been an English gentleman. The person he most resembles is Kenneth (Civilisation) Clark.19 August. Genuinely saddened last thing tonight by R. saying that Tom Daley hasn’t even reached the diving finals in Rio. He’s about the only competitor I cared about, feeling that for all his lustrous looks he’s had a difficult time and come through ...”

“... devaluation, and withdrawal from East of Suez was brought forward. The US Secretary for Defence, Clark Clifford, expressed his Government’s scorn at this display: ‘The British do not have the resources, the back-up or the hardware to deal with any big world problem ... They are no longer a powerful ally of ours ... ’ Devaluation, then, marked the ...”

“... Amery; industrialists in the arms business such as Arnold Weinstock of General Electric and the Clark brothers, who ran Plessey together with ‘two splendid shooting estates’; the old airplane maker Sir Thomas Sopwith, who owned a lovely stretch of the Test but also a grouse moor, which introduced Pincher to grouse and in turn to Viscount Slim and Sir ...”

“... of poetry was indeed a constant. One sign of his standing was the invitation to give the Clark Lectures at Cambridge, published in 1947 as The Poetic Image, one of his several attempts to lay down the law about the lawless nature of poetry. He and Lehmann tried their hand at founding a new literary journal, a fever that comes over so many writers at ...”

“... the century for scholars preparing to mark the centenary of The Waste Land’s publication. When Christopher Ricks reviewed Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Eliot in the LRB (1 November 1984; the same year Michael Hastings’s play about Eliot’s first marriage was staged), he remarked: ‘Plainly it is the Tom and Viv bits which we are all likely to home in ...”

“... is being recognised? Of course, better things do happen in phone booths, at least in fiction. Clark Kent and Dr Who regularly disappear into booths maintained to high standards of hygiene in order to pick up where they left off as extra-terrestrials. The time-travelling booth that launched Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) had a curious ...”