“... past noon on Wednesday 4 May 1921, a black waggon pulled out of the police headquarters at St Andrew’s Square. Inside, there were two prisoners, who were held in separate cabins. One of them called himself Frank Somers, though his real name was Frank J. Carty. He’d appeared in front of Stipendiary Neilson at the Central Police Court that morning, and ...”

“... Tell that to the Marines. Paul Fussell’s book from time to time seems hasty and ill-judged. Andrew Sinclair’s War like a Wasp reads as if it was composed in an air-raid shelter, under heavy bombardment. On its jacket we read that Sinclair’s ‘involvement with his childhood and adolescence in Britain has led to his writing of War like a Wasp’, and ...”

“... next century, the idea of the bard became linked to Homeric epic. By 1735 the Aberdeen philosopher Thomas Blackwell was writing that Homer was a ‘stroling indigent Bard’. Robert Burns liked that idea. In ‘Love and Liberty’ a bard sings alongside prostitutes and tinkers, and pronounces himself ‘Homer like’. Burns’s footnote (Burns enjoyed ...”

“... but one of the phrases in the fragment appeared to have been borrowed from the Coptic Gospel of St Thomas, the exception being that showstopper: ‘my wife’. In itself this proved nothing, and in fact the sixth line also departed from Thomas via a syntactical irregularity that made it all but nonsensical. But it raised the ...”

“... Andrew Motion’s book is intended to portray a family’s rich self-destructiveness. He begins with Larkin’s famous quatrain: Man hands on misery to man.   It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can,   And don’t have any kids yourself. The Lamberts – painter George (1873-1930), composer-conductor Constant (1905-51), and manager of The Who, Kit (1935-81) – got out as early as they could, and of the two who had kids neither showed paternal enthusiasm or skill ...”

“... only a writer of very High Modernist tendencies would take this remark as a compliment, but Thomas Mann certainly did, and it wasn’t even addressed to him. He found it in Harry Levin’s little book on Joyce, which he read in 1944. He was also much drawn to another sentence in the same work: ‘The best writing of our contemporaries is not an act of ...”

“... producing literary texts cunningly modelled on the work of some well-known author like Tennyson or Thomas Moore, which they then coolly claimed to be the lost original that the author had plagiarised. Maginn, who founded Fraser’s Magazine and died an alcoholic pauper, is said to have been familiar with Hebrew, Syriac, Sanskrit, Basque, Turkish, Assyrian and ...”

“... John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and Neville, Ethel, Edith and ...”

“... who profited from the existing order and those on whom its burden chiefly fell’. His book on Andrew Jackson tried to explain why he was not simply the champion of white frontiersmen (one reason his portrait is back up in the Trump White House), but, more important, fought on behalf of downtrodden men in the eastern cities against a National Bank that had ...”

“... Rome. And now Jerusalem is dust in the sun, His skies are blue. He’s coming, child, I come.’ Andrew Motion’s Dangerous Play consists of six poems from The Pleasure Steamers (1978), the poem Independence (1981), 16 poems from Secret Narratives (1983), and seven uncollected poems, including a long prose-passage, ‘Skating’, a memoir of his mother. The ...”

“... and Pale Fire’s Kinbote. It is clear that by giving consent to Field, Nabokov intended to do a Thomas Hardy: that is, write his life through a docile secretary. Indeed, he told Field as much: ‘I wanted to see the thing. The first biography, no matter what comes after, casts a certain shadow on the others.’ As events proved, Nabokov misjudged his ...”

“... for Grand Tourists or other wealthy travellers to more exotic lands. In 1799, for example, when Thomas Girtin was nearing the height of his fame as a landscape ‘genius’, Lord Elgin offered him £30 a year to carry out a pictorial survey of Greek monuments in what was then Turkish territory; ‘and as lady Elgin possessed a taste for drawing’, a ...”

“... and broken. He wanted to make everything glow and be great, and following Whitman, Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe and Fitzgerald, he may be the last of the traditional American literary frontiersmen, opening the Republic up to itself, and romancing the earth. Kerouac’s greatest childhood friend and hero was Sebastian Sampas. Ann Charters, in a nicely ...”

“... Lassie, we could do it without being suspected of trying for the popular touch; if we came across Thomas Aquinas, we wouldn’t have to pretend we found the thought in an old cookbook. This may sound utopian (or nightmarish: chacun son dégoût), but that is the point: the ease of unassorted reference, the sense of play continuing where seriousness would have ...”

“... work done by scholars in recent decades: Richard Bulliet on the economic importance of the camel, Andrew Watson on the role of the Arabs as introducers of new crops, Oleg Grabar on the Dome of the Rock, and so on. It is, however, a tribute to both the scope and depth of Lewis’s research in the past half-century that so much of the material he draws on is ...”