“... His heat and his motion. His grin and his shimmy. His robes and his finery. One side of the young Elvis was a faultlessly polite, radiantly ordinary boy next door. But he was also drawn to outrageous clothes, pimpish overload, endless resculpting of his princely hair. His everyday clothes look neither work-appropriate, nor what was then officially ...”

“... professors walked by, chatting loudly on their way to lunch. The man doing most of the talking was Allan Bloom, who much later published a bestseller called The Closing of the American Mind, a rather fascinating and even intimidating figure. Unashamedly effeminate, and clearly favouring his male over his female students, he was nonetheless a charismatic ...”

“... his most personal and revealing poems, “The Subverted Flower”.’ The poem certainly reveals a young woman’s revulsion when she perceives unconcealed sexual desire in her young man, who suddenly appears bestial in her eyes – but as to her ‘defloration’ precisely nothing at all is said. Meyers seems unaware that ...”

“... ever failed to get him to do so.’ Rider Haggard, in turn, obviously used Selous as a basis for Allan Quatermain in King Solomon’s Mines (1885). Like Selous, ‘Quatermain hunts trouserless and fortifies himself with cold tea.’ Then ‘life imitated art once again.’ Selous, in successive books, ‘sounded more and more like Ouatermain’. He became a ...”

“... to write sections and passages that he then added to the manuscript, and by 21 January his brother Allan was informing Harpers that the manuscript already exceeded the length originally agreed to, possibly hoping, but in vain, that they would pay a bit more for it. No manuscript of the novel has been found, but it is estimated that the additions make up about ...”

“... for Roubiliac’s statue of Newton ‘voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone’; Newton a young man and unwigged so that his head seems quite small and (appropriately) apple-like. We buy a luminous blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the ...”

“... will return.’ All this Cendrars felt after passing the grave of the founder of French psychism, Allan Kardec. Winter uses this story as a link to Gance’s J’Accuse and as an introduction to a whole chapter on the ‘enduring appeal’ of the ‘traditional motif’ of spiritualism. Apollinaire appears again later, this time for his ‘poetic ...”

“... the French portrait painters Jean-Baptiste Van Loo and Jean-Etienne Liotard, and the popularity of Allan Ramsay, the Edinburgh Scot who trained in Rome and Naples (whose portraits, wrote the engraver George Vertue, were ‘rather lick’t than pencilld’), offered British clients who had grown tired of the native tradition an aura of ‘cosmopolitan ...”

“... governmental decay. The litany of names reads like the cast-list of some bizarre Antipodean soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too ...”

“... no more’.The phrase has had several lives. It first appeared in a song by the Edinburgh poet Allan Ramsay published in 1724:Farewell to Lochaber, farewell to my JeanWhere heartsome wi’ her I ha’e many days beenFor Lochaber no more, Lochaber no moreWe’ll maybe return to Lochaber no more.The words were matched to an old melody, possibly ...”

“... psychology; I’m not sure there’s anything comparable in American literary history.† I was a young-gun devotee of Mailer, who made possible my start in writing, but I never wanted him to file adoption papers. A patriarchal nimbus settled on Bellow in his later years that remains unique, inspiring, a little weird, a bit Holy Ghost. Attending Bellow’s ...”

“... in Greenwich Village, and through one of the actresses there met and began taking classes with Allan Miller, a disciple of Lee Strasberg. She auditioned for Strasberg’s Actors Studio aged sixteen, and though she didn’t get in they encouraged her to try again later; piqued, she never did. When she left school in January 1960, she had her first role ...”

“... take a breath and look at his life, at how it was and how it was probably going to stay; but also young enough, particularly when surrounded by the bustling confident egoism of the Wordsworth household, to do what Yeats called taking ‘a great kick at human misery’, making it fertile, understanding it and mastering it. As early as 1797, everything in ...”

“... said. “I’ll call the whole thing Le Séminaire and divide it into numbered volumes.” The young man had set sail on a terrible voyage.’ Lacan bequeathed Miller a life’s work. Miller was not simply ‘editing’ but ‘establishing’ the text of the seminar. He added language where there were gaps, he removed contradictions and ...”

“... been so vulnerable: ‘Your word against his,’ as one UK college adviser said recently to a young undergraduate who’d been raped by a student, to discourage her from going to the police (the student turned out to be a serial rapist). To say the absence of witnesses can be abused is an understatement. In December, four women in the US revived sexual ...”