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“... 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 ...”

“... later, Wallace is no longer with us, but two of the Great Male Narcissists he cited, Updike and Philip Roth, are still displaying their self-absorbency and depriving tender young empaths of valuable column inches. With an almost audible sigh, Updike concedes that the pups have a point. ‘He or she may feel, as the grey-haired scribes of the day continue to ...”

“... in the precise pejorative sense used by Shakespeare in King Lear: ‘Get thee glass eyes,/And, like a scurvy politician, seem/To see the things thou dost not.’ So while the message of these texts is clear enough, their provenance makes them hard to interpret. The proportion of truth and invention in them cannot be gauged. Did Marlowe ...”

“... now looks suspiciously like a one-man tradition. So standard an item in recent collections has the Philip Larkin Memorial Poem become that it now exists as a genre in its own right, like the limerick and the villanelle. Thus Ewart again:                             For us, he’s gonemuch loved, humane; that shyly gloomy ...”

“... for our shortcomings. Even the restless, selfish Wilmet, eventually recognises that life is ‘a glass of blessings’ – the title of the novel she appears in. (The quotation is borrowed from George Herbert, one of Pym’s favourite poets.) Gently mocking self-love, Pym’s novels find redemption in commonplace pleasures – though without ...”

“... terms of a novelette,’ but in straight narrative, too, he often produced such sentences as: ‘Philip listened with all his ears, and though he felt a little out of it, his heart leapt with exultation. The time flew.’ ‘It can only be described in a hackneyed phrase, because it was a hackneyed thing’ was one justification, and hackneyed things turn up ...”

“... his own and suspect version of it, but he always turned against the end-product and its author. Philip Purser, for instance (‘Nosy Parker’ in Edward’s usual post-publication demonology), tried hard, in his short but entertaining The Extraordinary Worlds of Edward James (1978), to achieve detachment, but there is inevitably a feel of his subject’s ...”