“... you have new shoes that are too tight, or a table-top bleached by a hot dish or the wet rim of a glass, you might want to try the Pittagora family’s remedies. Marina Warner acknowledges the help of the Getty Centre in California, which is not known for its patronage of novelists. David Lodge, meanwhile, has been touring the Birmingham factories. Nice Work ...”

“... Of Philip Larkin’s​ many ostentatiously ‘less deceived’ accounts of family life, among my favourites is the soaring riff that concludes his introduction to All What Jazz (1970), a collection of mainly unimpressed reviews of John Coltrane, Miles Davis et al that initially appeared in the Telegraph. ‘Sometimes I imagine them,’ he muses of the readers of his monthly column,sullen fleshy inarticulate men, stockbrokers, sellers of goods, living in thirty-year-old detached houses among the golf courses of Outer London, husbands of ageing and bitter wives they first seduced to Artie Shaw’s ‘Begin the Beguine’ or the Squadronaires’ ‘The Nearness of You’; fathers of cold-eyed lascivious daughters on the pill … and cannabis-smoking jeans-and-bearded Stuart-haired sons whose oriental contempt for ‘bread’ is equalled only by their insatiable demand for it… men whose first coronary is coming like Christmas; who drift, loaded helplessly with commitments and obligations and necessary observances, into the darkening avenues of age and incapacity, deserted by everything that once made life sweet ...”

“... on a train to St Pancras to deliver, to his sovereign, the unique bloom of a lily, enclosed in a glass bubble. The man is a harbinger of death, showing how the bloom in its misty bubble is dead as a stone, how the beat of my heart in time with his journey is steadily slower. Other poems recall the mother in a hospital bed, fed with oxygen through a tube in ...”

“... taken to an eyeglass, after reading the case of a Major Parkinson who cut his throat with a bit of glass in a Holloway cell. Max’s was a tough, unsentimental world, but could combine both feeling and elegance with toughness. If Max really was leading a double life – a pleasurable but hardly tenable hypothesis – he concealed it well, spending a lot of ...”

“... and make your Holocaust victim an unusual souvenir of a memorable Sunday afternoon? Or maybe, as Philip Gourevitch observed, just throw it away as you leave the show? After all, the museum Holocaust experience always comes to an end, and your victim can easily be dumped with the trash when you’re safely back in the sunshine – a neat replay of ...”

“... practises, seems to occupy a smaller and smaller cultural space. Apart from the superstars like Philip Roth or Toni Morrison, literary writers in America are accorded a social status roughly equivalent to that of artisanal potters producing, like them, lovely, unnecessary work that hardly anyone cares enough about to want. (That’s the kind of writer ...”

“... with the Modern Movement than he himself did. Both were British-style maniacs of the purest water: Philip Morton Shand and Hubert de Cronin Hastings. Shand was the first writer on the Review to discuss Modern architecture from an international viewpoint. He wrote a brilliantly cockeyed history of Modern in 1934 that anticipates most of Pevsner’s Pioneers of ...”

“... young man was a friend of Sam Bassett’s, one of the two dead soldiers. The other was Rifleman Philip Allen, aged 20. Over the next half-hour the town got steadily quieter and I took up position beside an elderly woman in a wheelchair. She said she was cold, and, indeed, the wind was the sort that could pass through several layers of clothing. ‘But you ...”

“... or Mandelstam in Georgia). ‘First time I left abroad for abroad.’ That year, the painter Philip Guston won a Guggenheim and took off for Europe; nature abhorring a vacuum, Beckmann agreed to fill in for him at Washington University in St Louis. Two years later, in 1949, he was offered a job in Brooklyn, and took it. Ergo the Met’s Beckmann in New ...”

“... have never been or thought to go) that reminded me of Mandelstam’s Moscow, a ‘tossed salad of glass and wood and milk’: The next morning, when the city stirred to life, they both lay awake in their own beds. The homing pigeons flew across the sky, the small brass whistles bound to their tails humming in a harmonious low tone. Not far away, Tao music ...”

“... as punishment for looking into Persephone’s box of beauty, but revived by her lover, Cupid. John Philip Kemble revived Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in 1802 with his sister, Sarah Siddons, in the role of Hermione. At the end of the play, when Leontes is introduced to a statue of the wife whom he believes to be long dead, Siddons, draped in neoclassical ...”

“... the symbolism that Yeats got from the French poets, especially Mallarmé. In her essay ‘Philip Larkin: After Symbolism’ Barbara Everett has pointed out these French, echoes: the fact that, for example, ‘Sympathy in White Major’ is a kind of symbolist parody of Gautier’s ‘Symphonie en Blanc Majeur’, and ‘Arrivals, Departures’ echoes ...”

“... His correspondent, John Hohnsbeen, an art-dealer friend, was having an affair with the architect Philip Johnson, and the ‘unprivate walls’ are those of Johnson’s famous Glass House. Schuyler was 28 and this was his first serious mental breakdown. He had only recently arrived in New York after an extended stay in ...”

“... that when the former chairman of Faber, Charles Monteith, encountered the suggestion that one of Philip Larkin’s poems was indebted to Théophile Gautier, he was ‘incredulous’. To Monteith, the idea that Larkin might have been influenced by a foreign poet was ‘ludicrous’. ‘He had fallen,’ Raine comments, ‘for the propaganda – Larkin’s ...”

“... now somewhat ancient,’ he fretted, ‘one and thirty years is a great deal of sand in the hour-glass.’ But the lure of political advancement was too great. As the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Elizabeth I’s second most important adviser, and the nephew of Lord Burghley, her chief counsellor, he had been born to the purple. But he was the youngest of five ...”