“... You can see why a writer might want to tame them. In Cortázar’s ‘Casa Tomada’, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, the house and its occupiers are at war, and the drama lies in the question of who will come out on top. With Herrera, by contrast, there is never any doubt.In distrusting character, or finding it passé, the ...”

“... latter mood, he would become condescending and puckish, and would draw contrasts between bumptious young America and old experienced Europe. In 1919 Russell traced the pragmatism that Dewey shared with William James to ‘that instinctive belief in the omnipotence of Man and the creative power of his beliefs which is perhaps natural in a ...”

“... the corner of Howe Street and Heriot Row, where you are bound to feel the press of Stevenson’s young mind, for these are his ‘sleepy quarters’, his world of oil-lamps and dark coasts.He lived at 17 Heriot Row, five floors of grey Georgian elegance facing the Queen Street Gardens, the dell of A Child’s Garden of Verses. Stevenson would dedicate that ...”

“... politics; a promising Harvard dropout, John Leonard, who became a leading literary critic; and a young caption writer at Vogue called Joan Didion. All three ended their careers writing for the New York Review of Books.One of the problems National Review faced in the 1950s was that America possessed only the rudiments of an anti-liberal conservative ...”

“... and I have a deadly itchiness in my crotch.’ He thought about having sex in the shower with the young man; he contemplated ‘the murderous checks and balances of a flirtation’. But then he realised that he was, in fact, a respectable married man with three children who dreamed of having his face on a stamp. ‘But then there are the spiritual facts: my ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... Vogue editor Alexander Liberman, and Hess and Rosenberg were soon to convert, to be followed by young critic-curators like Sam Hunter and Lawrence Alloway. Just as important, Newman finally had patrons such as Ben Heller. ‘Ultimately,’ Amy Newman writes, ‘he entered and navigated [the art world] with more success and finesse than any of his former ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”