“... to me here. The only other place I have seen the word ‘corpun’ in print is in the Letters of Philip Larkin. As a neologism, it is as ugly as any one could contrive, but as a salacious expression and – apparently – as a piece of authentic Englishry, it was very close to his core.)The key phrase in Captain Waterhouse’s distraught peroration above is ...”

“... to join the silent conspiracy which now unites all the English poets from Robert Graves down to Philip Larkin, and all the critics, editors and publishers too, the conspiracy to pretend that Eliot and Pound never happened. Tomlinson refuses to put the clock back to pretend that after Pound and Eliot, Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens have written in ...”

“... and other dramatists of the time. Then think of the medieval minstrels and ballad-singers, who drew great audiences in village or castle to hear them recite poems. Think of the peasants in Russia, in Ireland, in Spain, in many other countries, still making up their own poems. In his ‘Lecture on the Uses of Poetry’, William Cullen Bryant, the great ...”

“... about his pursuit of a witch.Witekind’s account spread throughout Europe, reaching the reformer Philip Melanchthon in Wittenberg, as well as his son-in-law, Caspar Peucer, who recorded the story in 1560. Peucer’s reference to werewolves as the enemies of witches then found its way into the work of the Italian bishop Simone Maioli, from where it was ...”

“... history (even though the story wends its way from Thomas Wolfe through Nabokov and John Barth, Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, all the way to Raymond Carver), nor those of traditional aesthetics and literary criticism, which raise issues of value and try to define true art as this rather than that. The dialectical problems come in the reversals of class ...”

“... house that specialised in oysters. He liked to collect the shells. I have one here as I write: he drew on them with a pen to reveal the faces of Greek gods in their crevices. Norman knew everybody in the place and he asked for a kind of vodka punch. He always drank horrible drinks: at one point, back at his house, he asked me to make him a rum and grapefruit ...”

“... her valiant attempt to bring a bohemian spirit to a corporate building. With the help of Philip Johnson, MoMA’s first architecture curator, who had recently set up his own practice, Lambert spent six weeks travelling around America interviewing the most prominent practitioners of the International Style. She divided them into three ...”

“... by her. Particularly by her claim that she didn’t see the point of making things up: that she drew on her family and childhood for her early novels and historical data for her later work. He overdoes it. He often seems to be fighting an imaginary adversary: a reader who thinks that fiction is a code, who opens a novel and gets cross if an autobiography ...”

“... fairytale trappings still hinder its restoration to the pre-modern intellectual mainstream. In Philip Pullman’s Lyra’s Oxford (2003), Sebastian Makepeace slaves away in ‘a hot, close, sulphurous room lit only by the flames of a great iron furnace in one corner. Benches along each wall were laden with glass beakers and retorts, with crucibles and sets ...”

“... woman, stood by Oscar with her husband with great determination, but, as this scene suggests, she drew the line at being high-minded about him. Max was unimpressed too, although his common sense is not coldheartedness. He stood by Oscar, but he was not deceived about him. He saw that success had made him arrogant: ‘gross not in body only – he did become ...”

“... historians should consult his remarks on X, Catacomb, and the New English Weekly edited by Philip Mairet, a man of integrity and enthusiasm whom Sisson affectionately evokes: ‘his eyes would light up as visibly as the bulbs on a pin-table, as the ideas rattled round.’ The bohemian world of poets, painters and little magazines, the ‘natural ...”

“... the latter end, are apt to be labelled merely “episodes”.’ (Towards the end of 1914 Sorley drew a parallel between Gretchen and Belgium, presumably with Faust as Germany.) His complaint to the Master was that Faust dried up the creative instincts in other people: ‘There is nothing that I have ever thought or ever read that is not somewhere contained ...”

“... Richard Cobb, often in a class as small as an early Christian cenacle, was to be taught life,’ Philip Mansel recalled. ‘He did not simply describe, he transformed himself into a farmer overeating merely for the pleasure of depriving Parisians of their food; a revolutionary who had marinated in envy all his life and was using his position on the Committee ...”

“... daring as a challenge to the optimistic tenets of socialist realism. The premieres of these works drew such hysterical applause that they amounted almost to political demonstrations. Even the older works now acquired resonance of a quasi-oppositional kind. Attending a performance of the Leningrad Symphony in the early 1970s, the musicologist Richard ...”

“... there is much to support Taylor’s view. MI5, the Director of Public Prosecutions, and Sir Philip Myers, Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary, had all supported John Stalker’s efforts to get the tape he wanted. He had made abundantly clear where those enquiries were leading. The only obstructive figure was Sir John Hermon. Nor does Colin ...”