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“... included a veiled attack on her father. She met Hemingway, Pound, Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Man Ray, Brancusi. She and Thelma slotted in neatly with the American expats Stein called the ‘Lost Generation’. Thelma was lost and losing it more and more. Her life with Barnes (or Robin Vote’s life with Nora Flood), as described in Nightwood, involved ...”

“... Not everyone experienced ‘visions’, and for some the primary sensation was prolonged nausea. William James, eager to have a mystical experience, instead had a day of vomiting and diarrhoea. The insights into altered states of consciousness he describes in On the Varieties of Religious Experience came from nitrous oxide (laughing gas).Westerners ...”

“... to Surrealism for techniques of subliminal persuasion (Magritte had a small publicity firm; Man Ray was a renowned fashion photographer), and the movies tapped Surrealism for ideas about fanciful décor (Dalí advised Hitchcock as well as Disney). With Pop this surreal aspect of commercial culture was cycled back into art – think of the lush bits of cited ...”

“... This is Boswell in 1777, at the age of 37. In 1789 a letter to the depressing Cornish vicar William Temple reports: ‘I may have many gratifications but the comfort of life is at an end.’ His friend and master, Samuel Johnson, is dead. His ‘valuable spouse’, a spouse much deserted, has just suffered a slow and harrowing death from ...”

“... To His Sacred Majesty), on the new baby heir to James II (Britannia Rediviva); though never on William and Mary. Theological disputation, first Anglican in complexion (Religio Laici), then Roman Catholic (The Hind and the Panther). Historical chronicle (Annus Mirabilis). Translation: from Homer, Juvenal, Persius, Ovid, Boccaccio, Chaucer and others; and of ...”

“... for authority. Ginsberg often claims to have issued indirectly from Whitman’s and directly from William Carlos Williams’s overcoat: but Williams’s presence of mind in language is quite different from Ginsberg’s, and his poems are far more fully composed. Most of Ginsberg’s poems document his time and collapse into it. They haven’t survived the ...”

“... Ruby Sparkes, Eddie Chapman, Tommy Smithson – were in attendance; along with Lady Docker and ‘William Hickey’. Literary life has made few advances from that day in 1955. Gennaro’s being the aboriginal aka of the Groucho Club.) With the passage of time images from the Kray scrapbooks, once seen as the harmlessly boastful trophies of a pair of Proustian ...”

“... felt demeaned by her work’, but much of what they said suggests an unpleasant side to the job. Ray Durgnat recalled that when a punter touched one performer’s foot, ‘she muttered through gritted teeth, “Do that again and I’ll kick your fucking face in.”’ Another would stop the show when she got annoyed: putting a chair on the ramp, she would ...”

“... good place not to go out from. A self-curated mausoleum of memories: photographs, toys, magazines, William Morris wallpaper, Arts and Crafts furniture; a library of Victorian and Edwardian fiction, Stevenson, Meredith, Wells, Conrad, W. Pett Ridge. Moorcock, with his sacred cats in a basket, brings up a map of London on his screen, shifting and rearranging ...”

“... some henchmen to the Nassaus’ palace in search of the Garden painting people were talking about. William of Orange’s head of household refused to tell them where it was hidden. And he was, so the record has it, tortured to the point of death for having ‘faict refuz de bailler une painture de Jeronimus Bosseman’. (The servants were professionals: by ...”

“... accepted as genuine by Robert Sherard, Wilde’s first biographer; some of them are now in the William Andrews Clark Library in Los Angeles. A book collector named Herbert Boyce Satcher met Hope in New York in 1919; he described him as ‘a strange sort of vagrant poet’, who wrote refined verses ‘completely at variance with his character’. His ...”

“... in the Nebraska State Historical Society archives) of the 14-year-old Cather dressed as ‘William Cather, Jr’. For four years of her adolescence – even as bewildered relatives and neighbours looked on – the tomboyish Cather doggedly adopted this male alter ego as her primary public identity. She cut her hair short, wore boys’ jackets, ties and ...”

“... Colorado Springs, Colorado: ‘We were having lots of fun and then . . . our neighbour, “William”, started drinking beer and staring at us. Then, out of nowhere, William started up a chainsaw and cut my extension into six pieces.’ Westtown, New York: ‘I have been riding skateboards since 1976 . . . I’m glad ...”

“... In Cakes and Ale (1930), William Somerset Maugham has Willie Ashenden – his narrator and stand-in – explain that, in reputation-building terms, ‘longevity is genius.’ He comes out with this idea while discussing the case of his friend Edward Driffield, a Hardy-like figure who becomes the Grand Old Man of English Letters after seeing off late Victorian accusations of impropriety ...”

“... limed oak. It was this house where Eric Korn heard someone reading out the plaque as being to ‘William Butler Yeast’. ‘Presumably,’ Eric wanted to say, ‘him responsible for the Easter Rising.’ 17 February. Stopped by a man outside the post office in Regents Park Road who fishes in his wallet and shows me a note I sent nearly 50 years ago to ...”