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“... scar. How can the celebrity outsider maintain a sense of his identity, or painterly authority, when he is his own subject-matter and his audience sees that subject-matter as ‘other’, less than ‘us’? Basquiat’s solutions to this dilemma are often brilliant. In the triptych Zydeco (1984), for example, a cinematographer in profile looks through the lens of his movie camera ...”

“... To read the letters of Dorothy Richardson is to become exhausted, vicariously, by the ‘non-stop housewifery’ which consumed her days. From 1918 until 1939, Richardson and her husband moved three times a year. Every autumn, they settled in a primitive rented cottage in Cornwall, where Richardson was responsible for shopping, cooking and cleaning, as well as for her own and her husband’s sizeable correspondence ...”

“... he wrote in 1965 for the New Yorker, ostensibly a review of autobiographies by Evelyn Waugh and Leonard Woolf. On the pretext that ‘no one can read an autobiography which describes a time, a country, a class familiar to him without starting to compose his own,’ Auden turned this into an 11,000-word comparison of his ...”

“... the first, tone-setting story in his collection of short stories, Cross Channel (1996), is called Leonard Verity. In Barnes’s latest confection, set in the not-too-distant-future, the wealthy and unscrupulous entrepreneur Sir Jack Pitman imports and rebuilds all the major English tourist attractions on the Isle of Wight and opens up the island as a ...”

“... birth from one favourable literary atmosphere to another. His father had heard Charles Dickens read when he was six, had helped to found Granta and furiously defended the Liberal cause at the Punch table. John himself had been at Eton with Alan Pryce-Jones, Anthony Powell, Eric Blair and Cyril Connolly, who, we are told, stood at the door of his room in ...”

“... This Booke,’ Leonard Digges claimed in a preface to Shakespeare’s First Folio, ‘When Brasse and Marble fade, shall make thee looke/Fresh to all Ages.’ If we take the First Folio as our biggest bibliographical landmark, the history of early modern print looks like a journey towards material permanence: towards the production of books that had the power to endure through time, and to ‘redeeme’ their authors ‘from thy Herse ...”

“... to believe that a lord chancellor in love with a fairy can be anything but ridiculous,’ he told Leonard Woolf; ‘but one goes, and when the moment comes, it’s simply great … I should like to go every night, for the comedy and wit is as enthralling as the tragedy.’ Strachey wasn’t far wrong, either. What even Victorians regarded as Victoriana at its ...”

“... Queer this habit of mine of being garrulous. And I don’t mean that any eye but mine should read this. This is – really private. But I must say nothing affords me the same relief. What happens as a rule is, if I go on long enough I break through. Another habit is Dickens. She is always asking Murry to send a saving Boz novel she hasn’t yet ...”

“... put the idea from their minds, remembering those touching and boring notices in the Times which read: ‘NM writes: Colonel Jocelyn Lethbridge – always known to his friends as “Stubby” – will be long remembered and sadly missed not only by them but by the regiment and at the club. Always one for a joke, Stubby combined unswerving loyalty with a ...”

“... Hubertus Strughold’s Your Body Clock – ‘a book every intercontinental jet traveller must read’. You will learn in it how to minimise clock-shock on the way to Mars but not on the way to Mass. Though the book is dedicated to his wife, the only lunar periodicity that Dr Strughold can think of concerns female mosquitoes. A jetlaggard is not a ...”

“... and DJ-worship replaced the mid-century cult of the conductor. It’s possible, in other words, to read this period, from the mid-1990s to the end of the first decade of the new millennium, as one in which pre-existing popular or mass culture put in a claim to be considered the fundamental material out of which all art was – or should be – formed. To his ...”

“... studio with Yanko Varda, and became close friends with Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Virginia and Leonard Woolf, all of whom spent time in Cassis during those years. Through Max Ernst, a friend of Boué’s, he met the Surrealist poets and painters, and with Herbert Read and David Gascoyne, introduced Surrealism to ...”

“... it was that the better writers – whom we may as well call James Kelman, Alasdair Gray and Tom Leonard among others – wouldn’t join in on the song. ‘It’s their loss,’ she said. ‘I mean, what do they want?’ A fairly good idea of what they wanted could be gleaned at that time from a visit to the Scotia Bar in Stockwell Street, where the ...”

“... in the second. The implication, perhaps, is that the 1980s were judged by the two editors, Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks, to be likely to rate correctness of language above its political and social implications, while the 1990s will reverse these priorities. There is little point in taking issue with this, since in practice such divisions ...”

“... Other changes seem to display a shift in Mr Laurence’s romantic emphases: Greer Garson arrives; Leonard Bernstein departs. More interesting is the partial reversal of Mr Laurence’s estimate of Shaw’s criticism of Brahms. In 1960 he quoted Shaw’s remark that ‘Brahms is just like Tennyson, an extraordinary musician, with the brains of a ...”