“... struggle under the oil slick of the Gulf, in a picture grislier than – but indebted to – William Carlos Williams’s poem of 1930s class struggle ‘The Yachts’. And then Rich addresses herself: From shores of sickness you lie out on listless waters with no boundaries  floodplain without horizon dun skies mirroring its opaque face and nothing not ...”

“... circulated, or any of nature’s other more minor confidences uncovered by the likes of Darwin or William Harvey. To learn the secret of life is to figure out that DNA has a double-helical structure. And while Perutz did not make that discovery, he did run the Cambridge research unit in which the most notorious episodes of the double-helix story took place ...”

“... absurdly expensive and diametrically opposed to the wishes of the parents in this city’. William Bulger, the flamboyant state senator whose district was the bastion of the anti-busing movement, lamented the ‘unremitting, calculated, unconscionable portrayal’ of his mostly Irish-American constituents ‘as unreconstructed racists’. Defending ...”

“... became ex officio head of the Church of England. On any view this was going to be a problem, and James II as he now was, egged on by his theological advisers, made the worst of it. Among other unwise moves he declared the Test Acts, which barred Catholics and dissenters from public office, to be of no effect, allowing him to commission Catholics as army ...”

“... Wallace Stevens’s house (he didn’t die there); Emily Dickinson’s homestead (she did); William Carlos Williams’s Rutherford home (where the famous icebox was, they point out); Elizabeth Bishop’s last residence on Boston Harbor; the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, which reassembled Marianne Moore’s Brooklyn living space on its own third ...”

“... who ‘much later … compelled me to try and draw better’). Thankfully, Burne-Jones also had William Morris, his friend from university. They had chosen the cause of art together, and Morris was to barrel their joint enterprise along for the next forty years or so. Burne-Jones’s earliest works, done in the late 1850s, were in pen-and-ink, one of ...”

“... first leather bars, which Gunn had first visited two years earlier. He’d been staying at the William Sloane House YMCA on West 34th Street and developed a routine of ‘drinking all night, having an enormous meal at the Automat (which fascinated me) at 4 a.m., and then sleeping about five hours’. The Lodge, on 3rd Avenue between East 53rd and 54th ...”

“... keen to protect its interests in the region, Britain sent troops to occupy Baku. Major General William Thomson reprivatised the oil industry and declared martial law, ordering his soldiers to break a general strike. At the war cabinet in London, Lord Curzon argued that Britain should let the new Caucasian republics ‘cut each other’s throats’. The ...”

“... of references’ without which ‘it is spurious to discuss a long poem like In Memoriam James Joyce’. This sort of background work ought to be done and she seems well-equipped to do it. Harvey Oxenhorn’s book is of a different character. It is a critical assessment of the kind which used to be done summarily in an essay but which modern academic ...”

“... lecturer. He died in 1944. Leacock held his own in the world of Will Rogers, Robert Benchley, James Thurber, the early Wodehouse, A.P. Herbert and ‘Beachcomber’. Americans, or some of them, accepted him as a successor to Mark Twain. His Yankee-style hyperbole did not, for once, upset the British, for he practised the tricks of ‘sly English ...”

“... a few shades more sentimental and simplifying than the words inside. (Bowen in a 1968 letter to William Plomer at Cape: ‘Neither do I want any more of Miss Joan Cassell [sic].’)I read my way through quite a few of Bowen’s books, and when I finished I hardly knew what had happened in them. Her prose was sophisticated, her references depended on all ...”

“... world’ somewhat precariously maintained by the agoraphobic private detective Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart), whose old acquaintance Gavin Elster wants him to trail his (apparent) wife, the luminous Madeleine (Kim Novak). We don’t exactly see what Scottie sees, Wood says. Rather, we see what he would see if his eyes were a camera. If Scottie can ...”

“... How can we know Samuel Johnson without summoning him through the reanimating power of James Boswell’s Life? For the many scholars, writers, readers and collectors who call themselves Johnsonians, this is the near impossible task. Boswell first met Johnson in 1763, in the back parlour of a bookshop. It belonged to a friend of Johnson, Thomas ...”

“... respect rather than disposable celebrity. She has contributed to some of the better documentaries: James Ellroy, Anita Ekberg, Eric Sykes, watershed BBC2, air-hostesses and desert roads, midnight fodder on Channel 4, the real lost memories. She likes to use old film, degraded archive footage, and to have it reshot on tape, fed into her slim box of ...”

“... panic occurred’. Berlin mentions this, jokily and in passing, in several letters, but Alice James, the wife of William James’s son Billy, gets the full story of the disaster that didn’t happen, at least to Berlin. ‘I saw a thin flame crawling up the side of my window & decided that it would take at least ...”