“... sorcery I do. Being damned, I am amused to see the centre of love diffused ... That, with its frank recognition of relish, helps to explain how, in present-day war, a nice boy like Nikolai Rostov can be killed. There’s an impressive poem by R.N. Currey which begins, ‘This is a damned inhuman sort of war’ – a longer, more diffuse but more ...”

“... a spy network, a nest of Freemasons whose emblem was not an apron but the old school tie, quick to close ranks if one of its members came under suspicion, a conspiracy against the decent sort of England that Beaverbrook stood for, determined not to permit the cleansing transatlantic wind of the kind McCarthy unleashed in Washington to blow through the ...”

“... acknowledged a legal right to privacy. The German basic law, like the US constitution, contains no frank privacy right, but where American courts have let their common law privacy rights wilt in the shadow of the First Amendment, German courts have extracted from the constitutional protection of individual integrity a qualified right (somewhat overqualified in ...”

“... that ‘as scholars, we should not seek knowledge for its own sake.’ Since this comes as close as can be imagined to what you might think is impermissible academic ‘hate speech’, it was noteworthy that it passed practically without comment. In the UK, the Education Secretary, already on record as saying that he regards the idea of education for ...”

“... of intent. Best Value. Whatever turns you on, the Lea Valley has got it. A media-friendly zone (close to Docklands). A recreation zone for Essex Man (easy access to the M25). An eco-zone for butterflies, deer, asylum-seeking birds. The nice thing about no-go, Official-Secrets-Act government establishments is that they are very good for wildlife. Thick ...”

“... as a language of diffusion, inattention, that he inhabits like Daffy Duck in Hollywood. His friend Frank O’Hara once grumbled that Ashbery was ‘always marrying the whole world’; charmingly, the poem ‘Houseboat Days’ itself admits that ‘The mind/Is so hospitable, taking in everything/Like boarders.’ Hence my reference to Hollywood, the chaotic ...”

“... might paint only the head and hands of his portraits, while assistants managed the rest. This is close to the division of labour between the early master cinematic animators, who drew key positions in a sequence, and the ‘in-betweeners’ who drew the intervening frames; but it still doesn’t really represent what Disney did. (Though in published ...”

“... how to read the poems. One anecdote that Parker does not pass on to us concerns a meeting with Frank Harris, in which Housman took offence at Harris’s suggestion that the final stanza of ‘1887’, the introductory poem of A Shropshire Lad, was darkly intended. The poem remembers the Silver Jubilee celebrations, and Housman tests an ossified ...”

“... or Apollinaire did. (Never mind other teen crushes like Charlie Parker and William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara and Andy Warhol.) He felt like a poet with a capital P, writhing in the coils of Church and Satan, Evil and Beauty, Sin and Damnation. Which, God knows, all held plenty of allure for a sulky, half-Catholic male adolescent. But Baudelaire the poet ...”

“... with in-jokes. But in her journal, she documented her disappointment at not being accepted for Frank O’Connor’s writing seminar at Harvard as it leaked into every area of her life, and into her sentences, which flicker between the first and second person:You looked around and saw everybody either married or busy and happy and thinking and being ...”

“... about the forms, and no aspect of this dissatisfaction is more evident than the abandonment of any close connection between the forms and value. The unity of the forms which earlier had ensured their purity was given up when it became evident that analysis required that the forms blend with one another (as pleasure does with good and bad – the critical ...”

“... clearly misunderstood a passage in the White Diaries. Although there are discrepancies which come close to being howlers, there is no moment in the Black Diaries which settles the argument either way. Basil Thomson, who was the chief of the Special Branch created at Scotland Yard at the beginning of the First World War for the detection of enemy ...”

“... of contemporary events for the illustrated newspapers in the 1880s and 1890s. Lance Calkin, Frank Craig, Samuel Begg, Paul Renouard and others filled the pages of the Illustrated London News, the Graphic and Black and White while continuing to exhibit at the Royal Academy and the Salon. Their newspaper work – its realism and variety of subjects, its ...”

“... too, has its plaque; it is a living memorial, planted on 12 June 1998: ‘To commemorate Anne Frank and all the children killed in wars and conflicts this century.’ The plaque quotes from Frank’s diary: ‘I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will ...”

“... ironic, single-breath, present tense, synthesised diary-takes by one of the great Americans; Frank O’Hara on his lunch hour from the Museum of Modern Art; Douglas Woolf driving somewhere, between jobs; Fielding Dawson. Drummond speaks of the pieces that make up 45 as ‘stories’. Some of them are very short, a set of acknowledgments dropped into the ...”