“... that a candle might last different lengths of time depending on how it was treated. So Edna St Vincent Millay’s candle that burned at both ends and did not last the night was a well-understood way of saying that metaphorical flames that burned too vigorously and too fast might give a lovely light, but only briefly – just like a candle in the ...”

“... must be seventy now; the veterans who bear witness in The Vietnam War are about the same age. Vincent Okamoto grew up in a Japanese internment camp in Arizona. In Vietnam he saw horrors unfit for words: it was not an honourable war. Later he became a Superior Court judge in Los Angeles. Others still buzz with the adrenaline of the late 1960s and early ...”

“... Converts, a chatty survey of literary and artistic converts to Catholicism in England from John Henry Newman to the Second Vatican Council. Catholic journalists like McDonagh have always doted over these prize catches, but it is a good moment to investigate the way converts change the religion they embrace. Before Palm Sunday this year, the New York ...”

“... including first-rate 18th-century portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar ...”

“... to be repeated a mind-numbing 840 times. The piece wasn’t performed in full until 1963, when John Cage managed it with a relay team of 11 pianists: it took 18 and a half hours. The relationship with Valadon was, as far as we know, the last sexual relationship Satie had.His despondency slowed down his rate of production. For at least two years, his friend ...”

“... thoughts against thoughts in groans grind. For too long, Bishop had lived these moral choices of life/death, right/wrong, male/female: but at last, the early happy years with Lota had made them seem irrelevant, and Bishop, longing for Paradise since her blighted childhood, felt she had found it at Santarém: That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther; more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile in that conflux of two great rivers ...”

“... her siblings’ madness. Harold was less enthusiastic. He had his own nightmares – one starred John Galsworthy ‘belabouring’ him with a huge steak – and his own sexual problems: he climbed into bed on his wedding night grunting ‘Come here, boy.’ He may have been disturbed by Mew’s quaintness; he certainly found her difficult. When he published ...”

“... which a character based on Banks appears; two excellent accounts from the 1990s by the historian John Gascoigne situated Banks in the context of the English Enlightenment and the empire; Neil Chambers in 2007 contextualised Banks in the history of collecting; Patricia Fara has a rollicking go at Banks as an exploitative imperialist in Sex, Botany and Empire ...”

“... a notorious Spanish coastguard off Havana, the most consequential ear in history before those of Vincent van Gogh and Donald Trump. The British reaction had been tepid at first, and the country seemed to be basking in the long peace of which Robert Walpole boasted to the queen in 1734: ‘Madam, there are fifty thousand men slain this year in Europe, and not ...”

“... on a world at war’, Thompson shares space with some of her friends and rivals, particularly John Gunther, H.R. Knickerbocker and Vincent Sheean. Cohen is more interested in the personal lives of her subjects than in anything they wrote, an emphasis I found frustrating, even as I admired the stylishness of Cohen’s ...”

“... Sounds tracks such as ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’, ‘I’m Waiting for the Day’ and ‘Sloop John B’, although Wilson’s sound is more spectral, diffuse, a panorama rather than a wall. Spector not only remained a touchstone for Wilson, but became an obsession, a doppelgänger, a bogeyman. In 1967, Wilson became convinced Spector had somehow arranged ...”

“... charismatic, amoral outsider at the centre. The story got him the attention of the publisher John Farrar, who passed it to Edward Weeks at the Atlantic. Matthiessen was taken on as a client by ‘the toughest agent in town’. Bernice Baumgarten also represented John Dos Passos, Edna St ...”

“... His work was continued by men with similar hopes, including Roland de Mecquenem and Father Vincent Scheil, who wanted to find the ‘famous rival of Babylon and Nineveh’ which was ‘still sleeping underground and had not yet spoken’. By the standards of modern archaeology they made a terrible mess. But they filled the Louvre with remarkable ...”

“... Soldiers who showed signs of it were treated accordingly. Not everyone was as brutal as Clovis Vincent, a doctor at Tours, whose ‘persuasive’ technique involved high-voltage shocks combined with threats and orders to get better, or the well-known Austrian psychiatrist and later Nobel Prize-winner Wagner von Jauregg, who was tried after the war for his ...”

“... after the last four years’; ‘Heavens, what a vale of tears it is’; ‘Oh heavens, now John Ashbery and I have to go and have an “intimate” lunch with Ivar Ivask.’) In 1973 she wrote to James Merrill: ‘I could weep myself to think of Mr [Chester] Kallman’s weeping over “The Moose”.’ There is no explanation as to how she learned that ...”