“... dreams in time? Cities, great pools of forgetfulness,’ Murray wrote to her friend, the novelist Helen Anderson. There is something about this sentence, and many of the lines in her poems and letters, that makes us think of what would become the New York School of poetry, and it isn’t surprising that Ashbery should have responded to Murray’s work. That ...”

“... same fate waits inevitably on the man or woman of talent who consigns personality or persona to a small bright box. Clive James provided a clue to his own enduring charm when he said of Malcolm Muggeridge that he was like an old boiler which had come to be loved, not because it could heat the water, but because it went boink boink in the night. It was not ...”

“... and a poltergeist who would rattle beds in the early morning. The house’s owners were George and Helen Akley. Helen had written accounts of the hauntings for Reader’s Digest and for a local newspaper (she reported that the family lived happily with the ghosts: the poltergeist didn’t shake the beds at the weekend, so ...”

“... The London Review cover was the most spectacular because of its size, but several papers printed small photographs. Time Out offered a pictorial contrast: on the one hand, a particularly youthful and seraphic photograph, and, on the other, an enormous caricatured head gazing narcissistically over a tiny Westminster Bridge at its own reflection in the ...”

“... scholar, and had read widely. He was soon going to literary parties, and met Pound – then ‘a small but persistent volcano in the dim levels of London literary society’ – and through him Helen Doolittle, who later became his wife. It was at a meeting in a bun shop in Kensington that these three were supposed to have ...”

“... of Communism. He recites a short poem he’s written about Oscar Wilde. Just before sunset a small aeroplane flies over, dragging an advertising banner. It says: ‘Havana/Madrid. Lobster Dinner. $15.99’. The conversation in Key West is still about the two US civilian aircraft shot down by Cuban MiGs, the dead Cuban-American pilots and the organisation ...”

“... In​ 2019, all four artists nominated for the Turner Prize – Helen Cammock, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani – shared the award, not at the instigation of the judges but at the request of the artists themselves, who asked to be considered as a collective rather than individual entrants, ‘in the name of commonality, multiplicity and solidarity ...”

“... Osman were in a band called Geoff. In his memoir, Coal Black Mornings, Anderson describes the ‘small-town wannabes’ rehearsing in his ‘dank, north-facing bedroom’ before going out to play gigs in other people’s bedrooms:Sometimes Mat and I would write stuff at his house. Despite a patina of middle-classness, his beginning wasn’t much grander than ...”

“... Walker. From this side of the gallery the rooms lead onto the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s as well as a small lightbox room with dayglo scenes by Nick Knight, but one really needs to go all the way in the opposite direction, through the 1980s and some unlikely in-between rooms (including a round-the-wall timeline that ought to be at the start) and then backwards ...”

“... almost all the stories in this book recognise it in one way or another. Most, like the examples by Helen Garner, David Brooks, Peter Carey, Joan London, Kate Grenville, are admirably achieved on this basis, the authors all born in the Forties or Fifties; and the names indicate that the newer European immigrants have not yet found a voice in their new ...”

“... wanted under-eighteens. Past it at 25! I speculated about reapplying as 17 using my first name, Helen. One look in the mirror told me it wouldn’t wash. Then, after months, a letter arrived telling me to go to Central Casting. The poky office was tucked away above a multi-storey car-park off Piccadilly. I handed in my shadowy, ravaged picture. (The local ...”

“... who lived in industrial districts started work earlier than those from agricultural areas and small towns. Division of labour and semi-mechanisation created new jobs for children in traditional handicrafts such as pin making, saddlery, toy making, lace embroidery and cutlery making, while factories provided new sorts of work for children as ...”

“... Clara Westhoff, whom Becker had met in Worpswede, joined her in Paris, and they each had a small studio on the rue Campagne-Première, near the Académie Colarossi, where they studied for six months, painting from the figure and the nude. Becker wrote to Modersohn, trying to persuade him to come to Paris. He arrived in early June but three days later ...”

“... the heroic couplet, the staples of English versification from the 16th to the 19th century, seem small-timers by comparison. Sestinas have come and gone. Ottava rima and rhyme royal had their day, but lost favour when readers ceased to want long poems which combined storytelling with epigrammatic cleverness. Even now, when set poetic forms are generally ...”