“... about the progress of the script, which needless to say never got written. Firbank rather than Wilde. Geoffrey played Warren, the king’s doctor, in the film The Madness of King George, with Cyril Shaps as Pepys, who set great store by the king’s motions. ‘Oh the stool, the stool,’ said Warren. ‘My dear Pepys. The persistent excellence of the ...”

“... ought to be extended. Add to it Bomberg and Epstein in Whitechapel before the Great War (with William Roberts and others as possible recruits), snarling at Wyndham Lewis’s safe Soho Bohème: they are as close as the capital ever came, I think, to a genuine homegrown (meaning homeless and hybrid) modern art. When Bomberg went to Paris with Epstein in ...”

“... points of the novel (others were Warhol and Werner Herzog and Kierkegaard and Otto Rank and Oscar Wilde) was the first season of The Hills, an American structured reality show that began on MTV when Heti was 28: ‘I was like, what if we cast ourselves as those girls have been cast?’ The Hills followed blonde best friends trying to make it in LA; How Should ...”

“... own intentions. Benjamin Markovits, The Syme Papers Poor Bunbury died this afternoon. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest If everyone says Tom did it when the man who did it was Will, the result is what one calls an error, and Will is done out of his due. If while everyone says Tom did it you see Will and hail him as Tom, error cancels error ...”

“... it’s The Chiltern Hundreds, which isn’t rubbish but a well-plotted light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my ...”

“... as relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types – William James being another and later example – to mistake manhood for the capacity to endure pre-arranged physical hardship. Their version, no doubt, of the English public school. It will be obvious that Leverenz likes to stay close to home – as with ...”

“... woman, Florence Barger, as confidante. All this is fair enough; Forster, when he agreed first that William Plomer and then P.N. Furbank should write his biography, did not ask that matters of this kind should escape discussion. He lived the greater part of his life under a hated law that banned and might brutally punish his kind of sexuality; it long blighted ...”

“... revenge as Kipling’s ‘Dayspring Mishandled’. Not half as curious, though, as the story of William Morton Fullerton (1865-1952) himself, as pieced together by his last female pursuer. This handsome, dark, blue-eyed, dapper, short American (Henry James gives him much longer legs as Merton Densher, as well as turning him into an Englishman), owner of a ...”

“... the spirit world. When, in 1905, during a séance in Boston, a medium spoke in the presence of Mrs William James of a communication from a ‘Mary’ to Henry, the message was dutifully passed on to Henry James in England, who wrote that it was his ‘dear Mother’s unextinguished consciousness breaking through the interposing vastness of the universe and ...”

“... In Cakes and Ale (1930), William Somerset Maugham has Willie Ashenden – his narrator and stand-in – explain that, in reputation-building terms, ‘longevity is genius.’ He comes out with this idea while discussing the case of his friend Edward Driffield, a Hardy-like figure who becomes the Grand Old Man of English Letters after seeing off late Victorian accusations of impropriety ...”

“... a well-earned shift of emphasis. Hazlitt would have learned this way of thinking from his father, William Hazlitt Sr, a notable sermon-writer whose work was published by Joseph Johnson, the publisher of Wordsworth and Blake. Yet the morality of Dissent always seemed to press up against a crisis of belief. The Antinomians in New England made the challenge most ...”

“... this was a locale familiar to Firbank, and associated with many artists and writers including Wilde, but to the innocent young woman it is a crowd of strangers. It was Joe Orton, one of a later generation to acclaim and emulate Firbank, who called him ‘the only impressionist in the English novel’ – a painterly analogy I wouldn’t want to press too ...”

“... for a long time in London with Hester Travers Smith, the author of Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde. In the years between Beckett’s arrival in Paris in 1928, where he and McGreevy taught at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and the outbreak of the Second World War, the years in which the letters in this volume were written, McGreevy was Beckett’s ...”

“... United States, the one she had been reading since she was a teenager. Its editors, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, no longer worked in tandem as they had in the old days; Phillips alone discovered Sontag and took her up as a representative and promising young writer. He memorably misassigned her to the journal’s theatre column, the post that had been held ...”

“... from a novel about Shakespeare: ‘“Fye, Will,” said Lucretia, arching backwards and pulling William towards her, “keep thy wit for thy plays, for wit is a poor actor that comes on and plays his part and is heard no more, but the part I would have you play hath more will in it than wit.”’ Has there been a year when such a book would make the Booker ...”