“... in North Beach. On 25 February 1962, Ginsberg thanked Ferlinghetti for a royalty cheque. He said that he had met up with Gary Snyder who looked ‘older and a little more domestic-acting … his face is more seamed and wrinkled’. Together, they’d plotted an expedition to the Himalayas, to stay in a ‘yoga forest school, talk to the dalai lama ...”

“... Pevear’s and Larissa Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit equivocates and hides. Wit is a scoundrel, while stupidity is honest and sincere.’ And again, in ...”

“... its own building, an International Style box clad in white marble designed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, on 53rd Street. A significant extension has followed every twenty years or so, each coolly modernist in style – totally abstract, highly engineered, fiercely refined, elegantly branded. The first was conceived by Philip Johnson in 1964, the ...”

“... for bigger battles.The most damaging of these involved a popular young economist on the faculty, Edward Ross, whose public pronouncements against capitalism in general and railroad companies in particular so affronted Jane that she demanded Jordan fire him. Academic freedom had been a contentious issue on campuses since the rows over the teaching of ...”

“... from’ echoes the reckoning with British colonial education in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s writings on ‘Nation Language’, George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin, Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey and Austin Clarke’s Growing Up Stupid under the Union Jack, among others. Much like these precursors, Brand is ...”

“... PENCE (‘shame on him who thinks evil of it’), the motto of the Order of the Garter, founded by Edward III in 1348. The meaning complicates; we are left to reflect on the nicked neck of blemished perfection.Any book made by hand is unique, but the Pearl Manuscript’s claim to uniqueness is unparalleled: the manuscript appears never to have been copied or ...”

“... Mayers Hyndman, who was notorious both for his socialism and his pronounced antisemitism (he once said of Marx’s daughter Eleanor that she ‘inherited in her nose and mouth the Jewish type from Marx himself’). Engels disliked him intensely, and it didn’t help that Hyndman, hiding behind the name Broadhouse, had published selections from Capital in an ...”

“... was a commitment from one of the political parties; hence the question Annie Kenney shouted at Sir Edward Grey at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester: ‘Will the Liberal government give women the vote?’ It would not: the cabinet was divided. H.H. Asquith, prime minister from 1908, was an ‘anti’, and the government was in any case preoccupied with its ...”

“... My mother, who was with me that day, was unusually quiet as I drove her home. She simply said: ‘If you open that suitcase you’ll never close it again.’While she enjoys certain kinds of complication (seating mourners correctly at a funeral, insulting someone with a second-class stamp, genealogy), my mother has an aversion to others (washing ...”

“... 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 Vincent Millay and Raymond Chandler, who sacked her for calling the Philip Marlowe of The Long ...”

“... sent off to be thoroughly Englished at Uppingham School, then under the headship of the magnetic Edward Thring. Hornung loved everything about the school – the headmaster, the classics, the ethos of muscular Christianity and above all the cricket, although he was not much good at games, being tiny, near blind behind his pebble glasses and afflicted with ...”

“... have put that daunting note in the stage directions. It can’t have helped; I might as well have said: ‘If it can be arranged I’d like this film to be a masterpiece.’ Earlier in life I used to revel in the break from my routine that filming provided while feeling myself as scriptwriter to have as necessary a role as the Make-Up Department or ...”

“... had no idea who the Imagists were. ‘You should know your fellow countryman, Ezra Pound,’ Monro said. ‘I’ve never heard of him,’ Frost replied.It was an odd narrative to insist on, given that books had been his escape from a struggle-filled, ramshackle early life. He was born in 1874 and spent his first eleven years in San Francisco, where the Frost ...”

“... an aide scribbling on a pad during coffee on the sofa. There might, after all, be something to be said for ‘the hard grind’.The​ veteran political correspondent Peter Oborne is unrepentantly nostalgic for the old order. He begins his philippic, The Assault on Truth, by quoting two sentences in the Ministerial Code: ‘It is of paramount importance that ...”

“... first words of her lovely, vibrant voice I felt I had known her for years. Nothing she could have said would have surprised me; I believed at once everything she said … I have never seen a more comical figure than Sarah in the second act, where she appears in a simple dress, and yet one soon stops laughing, for every inch ...”