“... this deadpan claim to literary originality: Swift lifted these words from the Restoration poet Sir John Denham’s praise of Abraham Cowley: ‘To him no author was unknown,/Yet what he wrote was all his own.’ As it happens, it was Cowley’s rhapsodic style Swift began his career by imitating, so that (he bragged to a cousin in 1692) ‘when I writt what ...”

“... so they won’t tell about it.’ In publishing these stories Bowles joined Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams and James Baldwin as one of the pioneers of gay fiction in America. Williams read ‘The Delicate Prey’ while accompanying Bowles to Tangier on the SS Vulcania in December 1948. ‘It was a stormy crossing, and I ...”

“... they are good to read, give reader and listener pleasure, irritate neither. The success of Kit Williams’s Masquerade certainly cannot be explained by its prose style. ‘The dewy vapours of her gown fell soft upon the land’ or ‘It was in thus doing that the unhappy Moon was the instrument of her own undoing’ are not the stuff of good story ...”

“... only other models,’ she writes in this new biography, ‘are Renaissance figures such as John Dowland and Thomas Campion.’ (She might have looked sideways to Noël Coward, Bob Dylan or Cole Porter; to John Cage’s poetry, Ezra Pound’s operas, the compositions of Christopher Fry or Anthony Burgess.) One of the ...”

“... enjoyed the public-school master Mountgrace-church MacDiarmid’s taste in literature: Selected John Ashbery, Schuyler, O’Hara, Gravity’s Rainbow, and End as a Man, Young Torless, Cavafy and others bizarrer, Lord Weary, Das Schloss, Lady Windermere’s Fan ... The nymphomaniac pensioners in ‘The Sexy Old Ladies of Havergo Hall’ are less ...”

“... In 1948, Tennessee Williams published a short story (and collection of the same title) called ‘One Arm’. It is about Oliver Winemiller, a magnificent young navy boxer who lost an arm in a car crash when he was 18, and whose life has subsequently gone to ruin. Working as a male hustler, he services thousands of men in cities throughout America ...”

“... contributed to a no-nonsense, suck-it-and-see anti-intellectualism. For socialist playwrights like John Arden and Edward Bond, the consequence, in one case, is external and in the other a form of internal exile. But the most noted instance of the prophet rejecting his own country is the director Peter Brook who, having forged a glittering career in the British ...”

“... assassinations was to put oneself in line for immortality. Who would nowadays remember Oscar Williams’s verses if Jarrell had not said that they seemed to have been written on a typewriter by a typewriter? Williams at that time was a powerful anthologist and in career terms it was bad policy to mock ...”

“... I made another personal discovery: Stuart’s mother was descended, through her mother, from John Rock Grosset, a pro-slavery Tory MP who owned a plantation in Portland. Further questions arose. What, beyond simple economic interest, turned people into active pro-slavers? What were they afraid of? How did they hope to stem the tide of abolitionism? How ...”

“... William Walton (1902) and Lennox Berkeley (1903), with the reassuring presence of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872) hovering over them all. Whether Tippett ever entered the pantheon, or even deserves to, remains an open question for some. His Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1939) might slot seamlessly into a concert programme of English string pieces like ...”

“... that bear resemblance – in varying degrees – to its currently popular versions. Even Bernard Williams, who ten years ago incautiously expressed the hope that ‘the day cannot be too far off when we hear no more of it,’ has bowed to the inevitable and edited, with Amartya Sen, this substantial collection of essays by philosophers and economists. And ...”

“... Brechtian theory of erst fressen, Caute has also written money-spinning soft-porn thrillers as ‘John Salisbury’.) Like his previous attempt at mixing 100 per cent proof world history with the small beer of English fiction (The Decline of the West, a title to rank with Mel Brooks’s History of the World, Part II), News from Nowhere is a crashing ...”

“... until 1589, when he came into his inheritance in Kent. He succeeded in this position one Walter Williams, whose doings as a confidential agent for Sir Francis are well documented. Honan, like Riggs and Charles Nicholl in his account of Marlowe’s death, The Reckoning, assumes that Thomas Walsingham was in the same business: Honan supposes that in his time ...”

“... and royals (Princess Marina, Queen Victoria Eugénie, the Princess Royal). Vera Brittain, Ivy Williams (‘the first woman to be called to the English bar’) and Rachel Crowdy (she ‘belonged to a generation when women had to possess very obvious strength of character if they were to attain recognition’) are the only women who might be described as ...”

“... and necktie, pipe in his mouth. The posture was both a mask and an admission: he was lost. Chawley Williams, a drug dealer turned poet who befriended Wilson early on and to whom Wilson dedicated King Hedley II, said: ‘August wasn’t really Black. He was too dark to be white, and he was too white to be dark. He was in no man’s land.’In 1965, rummaging ...”