“... own literary biography. For this was a man of secretive bent who had served his time when young among the Surrealists, but had then broken with them, rancorously, as was the tradition among André Breton’s quarrelsome flock. It was a wonder that Queneau had ever wanted to be part of it because his inclinations had always urged him towards the safely ...”

“... 1952, at a meeting of the Shaw Society, he publicly relinquished work on the bibliography – and young Dan Laurence, then a college graduate assistant, stood up and announced that he would undertake the job. Thirty-one years and 15 days later it was published. Mr Laurence has been sustained over these decades, he tells us, by ‘angry determination’. What ...”

“... in his encouragement of lesser (or even equal) writers. ‘Was anybody ever better company?’ Allan Gurganus recalls. ‘Ready as he was to laugh, making James Merrill laugh pleased us like a good week’s work. And oh to be thought talented and graceful by the one person alive who was most purely both’. Nights and Days (1966) contains three of ...”

“... suppose that Holmes would soon disappear too. He’s a derivative of the detective heroes of Edgar Allan Poe and Emile Gaboriau, matched with a Boswell figure (Watson) to act as stooge and narrator, with a few added clichés from the Victorian literary bazaar. Dickens and the melodrama supplied fog and gaslight; Stevenson, Wilde and Pater props and ...”

“... succeeded him. Like his predecessor, Johnson started out at the bottom of the social ladder. As a young man he was an indentured servant. But while in Lincoln early deprivation sparked open-mindedness, political dexterity and fellow feeling for the downtrodden, including slaves, Johnson was not only stubborn and self-absorbed, but incorrigibly racist. During ...”

“... Descartes’s Meditations tells the story of six days in the life of a rather self-important, busy young man who has granted himself a short sabbatical. Quite a few years have passed, he says, since he decided to take this meditative mini-break, and now at last he has cleared a whole week to spend in an isolated house with only his thoughts and memories for company ...”

“... The mother’s name, for a start, is Lenore, and therefore, thanks to two famous poems by Edgar Allan Poe (the name features in ‘The Raven’ as well as ‘Lenore’ itself), steeped in death as a set of literary conventions, something that happens in books. The associations are all the stronger for not being commented on – there’s no weary ...”

“... and patrician carriage promoted his career. Todd is not a man who could ever have been overlooked. Young Alex walked to and from school in wretched wartime shoes (those were great days for the profiteers who were said to make cardboard shoes for issue to the trenches). Todd thinks it was these shoes in conjunction with the inadequate wartime diet that were ...”

“... but also in having more than a touch of the ham actor, coming belatedly, via his beloved Edgar Allan Poe, to the repertoire of romantisme noir knowing it to be a repertoire. Irony always saves Baudelaire from sporting an off-the-peg undertaker’s uniform and parading an easy, gothicised melancholia. The game is nevertheless deadly serious and supplies the ...”

“... The scenes in Night and Morning where the caustic and worldly debauchee Lilburne abducts a young girl with the intention of deflowering her – unaware that she is his own grand-daughter – would outrage today all those who lately denounced the film of Lolita. But he also wrote so hurriedly that his prose could go horribly awry, and he was perhaps ...”

“... this case it was the famous romantic novel by Bernardin de St Pierre, Paul et Virginie, in which a young couple are brought up together in the beauties of the tropic wilderness, are all in all to each other, and die together before any hint of sexuality can appear in their relations. William knew the book well, and so did Dorothy. This has been mentioned ...”

“... Or a caste. There’s the Vidal who appears in Two Sisters and the Vidal who appears as his young self in his Roosevelt novel, The Golden Age. There’s the ventriloquist Vidal, recognisable in some of his historical characters – Aaron Burr and the Emperor Julian – as well as in his satires. In Burr, Charles Schuyler, a character invented by Vidal ...”

“... a redhead, which Geraldine considered unfortunate for a socialite. Jackson wrote regularly from a young age, putting on short plays for her classmates and editing the school newspaper. ‘Writing used to be a delicious private thing, done in my own room with the door locked, in constant terror of the maternal knock,’ she later recalled in a lecture. Images ...”

“... at the start of 1980. Yet as an undergraduate at Cornell Wolfowitz had come under the influence of Allan Bloom (later to attain notoriety as the author of The Closing of the American Mind), and, as a postgraduate at Chicago, of Bloom’s own mentor, the conservative philosopher Leo Strauss. Although Strauss, a German Jewish refugee who tended towards ...”

“... going on is an open question. The American postgraduate school was not, in his view, a place where young minds were likely to receive the instruction essential to America’s moral health. The University of Chicago was a case in point. Founded in 1892 and heavily endowed by gifts from the Rockefeller family, Chicago was home to another kind of Humboldtian ...”