“... play. Simone Weil got the boot, as did Nina Simone and Simone Signoret, Jowett (of Balliol fame), James Agate, Jane Austen, Molly Bloom, Hegel and Henry James, all of them biting the distinguished dust. 2 June. A situation on the margins of social interaction develops opposite. Working outside No. 60 is a handsome, though ...”

“... three tomes in quick succession: Sharon O’Brien’s Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice (1987), James Woodress’s Willa Cather: A Literary Life (1987) and Hermione Lee’s Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up (1989). More recently, Benjamin Taylor published Chasing Bright Medusas (2023), and now Garrett Peck’s The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her ...”

“... and green of the hills. This is where you find Tibbie Shiel’s Inn, where the Blackwood’s boys James Hogg and Christopher North used to come to liquefy their rhetoric. We entered from a smirr of rain, snoking for supper. It turned out supper was something that happened in the glen before 6.30 p.m. A lady in a white lab coat emerged to remind us of the ...”

“... biographies have appeared over the years. The most scientifically detailed is Subtle Is the Lord by the physicist Abraham Pais, which, though enormously valuable to the mathematically competent, contains far too many difficult equations to be readily comprehensible to most. Much more accessible (though more than six hundred pages long) is Einstein: His ...”

“... out of it, or the title of the second anyway. Finn. Finnegan. It was here on 10 June 1904 that James Joyce met Nora Barnacle, who worked in the hotel. The two young strangers who had locked eyes stopped to talk, and they arranged to meet four days later outside the house where Sir William Wilde, eye surgeon to the queen in Ireland, if she should have ever ...”

“... the worst during the war and were themselves responsible for the appointment of a committee under Lord Fleming to consider their relationship to society and to wartime democracy. The committee’s report was feeble, though some children benefited from the scholarships set up by a few education authorities under its aegis. Doing away with the public ...”

“... tropics, the search for a different earthly orientation or accommodation)? Maybe Browning or Henry James – the Master and onlie begetter, I am increasingly coming to think, of all the great modernist poets, of Pound and Eliot and Moore and Stevens?Most readers of the poems will have a pretty accurate sense of the life, though not one derived from the ...”

“... assigned to the ‘hedge fund overlord’, the ‘polo-playing playboy millionaire’, the ‘James Bond of the Russian oligarchy’, the ‘French luxury goods tycoon’ (also appearing as the ‘French luxury titan’), the ‘serial dater of supermodels’, and the ‘leveraged-buyout king’. The book is illustrated with photographs of de Pury’s ...”

“... old lady’s hands, lying idle in a lap somewhere.1 June. Coming to the end of English Pastoral, James Rebanks’s second volume. It’s harder to read than A Shepherd’s Life, with the central section about the onset of factory farming not easy to take. Thankfully, though, in his own life at any rate the tide turns and Rebanks regains his grip on ...”

“... Cork. Townsend went on to found Art Monthly in 1976 with Jack and Nell Wendler. Under Townsend, James Faure-Walker had been a contributor to Studio International. Cork made his copy less welcome and Faure-Walker and others set up Artscribe. Eventually Peter and I began to meet at Bertorelli’s for wine, talk, food and more wine. At my suggestion, John Tagg ...”

“... and Lukacs. Thematically, Doctor Criminale shapes up as a kind of post-Maastricht version of Henry James’s international theme: English ingenuousness discovers corruption beneath the seductive surfaces of European civilisation. For all his postgraduate knowingness about Barthes and other purveyors of the higher froggy nonsense, Francis is revealed to be a ...”

“... charge of attempting to obtain money under false pretences. The author of that hoax, reputed to be Lord Birkenhead, turned out to be an actor named Hesketh Pearson. In a subsequent book of breezy reflections on the craft of biography called Ventilations, Pearson gave examples of how the non-fiction writer may use his fancy to improve on fact – a perversion ...”

“... who was fussy about what he would or would not eat could scarcely do a prince’s business. As James I instructed his son, ‘your dyet should bee accommodatte to your affaires, & not your affaires to your diet.’ The job of the dietary writer was, therefore, to work within these conventions, fine-tuning them to ensure that courtiers, and those who ...”

“... distaff, they knew their stuff. Mary Dawdon of Masham in Yorkshire gave eleven pounds of yarn to James Thompson in August 1695, but when he returned the finished product she was sure he had cheated her. ‘[It] being fine wool she did expect to have again eight yards of fine cloth, the list of the said run web being all white, but … Thompson did bring ...”

“... of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen describe an occasion in July ...”