“... should not really be discouraging to anybody over the age of 18.’ It was easy to argue, as Lewis Mumford did, that Jacobs’s lack of interest in poverty and the realities of slum life was the result of romanticism, that she was what would later be called a ‘gentrifier’, a middle-class incomer dazzled by the big city and making it her own. In one ...”

“... the public career, in Notes for a New Culture, Blake was alluded to only as a source for Wyndham Lewis. Vorticist prose, Ackroyd claims, ‘closely resembles that of William Blake; there is even a prose poem in Blast, entitled Hamp, which draws heavily upon Blake’s prophetic books.’ Blake (and Bunyan) ‘were both convinced that their work derived from a ...”

“... respect’ for them, as fellow professionals. Amicus briefs supporting Roe were also filed by Margaret Mead, a former Miss America, and religious groups, including Episcopalians, Jews and the United Church of Christ.The lawyer representing Texas began his argument by saying: ‘It’s an old joke, but when a man argues against two beautiful ladies like ...”

“... Portrait of Innocent X. The reviews managed to express both revulsion and excitement, and Wyndham Lewis made serious claims:Of the younger painters, none actually paints so beautifully as Francis Bacon … I must not attempt to describe these amazing pictures – the shouting creatures in glass cases, these dissolving ganglia the size of a small fist in which ...”

“... Colm Tóibín’s today is all books, though said to look over rooftops, which could be nice; Margaret Drabble’s faced the street, but with curtains so long and John Lewis-like I’d be frightened they’d get into the prose; Edna O’Brien’s had some relics of Samuel Beckett, hardly likely to unchain the ...”

“... were sailing regularly from the Clyde to Oban and Fort William and the islands of Mull, Skye, Lewis and Staffa, where Fingal’s Cave had been attracting visitors by sailing boat since the mid-18th century: the list included Joseph Banks, Samuel Johnson and John Keats. Mendelssohn was an early visitor by steamboat (‘He is on better terms with the sea as ...”

“... his admiration for the ‘luminous brutal prose, blocked-in with a painter’s eye’ of Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr, Powell identified self-pity and sentimentality as besetting weaknesses of romanticism – traits he detected in many well-regarded writers: Wilde, Ford, Greene, West, even Joyce. How did he square this dislike with his admiration for Proust? He ...”

“... it might just be never to have sex again, and die anyway. ‘The​ problem remains,’ Sean Day-Lewis wrote in the Daily Telegraph in 1982, ‘that Aids, or the “Gay Plague”, is not limited to active homosexuals.’ In both the US and the UK (which bought up to 60 per cent of its Factor VIII, a clotting agent used to treat haemophilia patients, from ...”