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“... thinks this is terribly vulgar and refuses to do it. Also, he says, according to research at Johns Hopkins University, people who change sex quite often commit suicide. I feel worried for Caroline, who at the moment looks so happy. Monday. I am out of hospital but I missed the literary party. Still, my cousin Cate is giving one for single people. I am on three ...”

“... of the facts of Keats’s life and its English context. Thirty years have passed since then, and Andrew Motion remarks, reasonably enough, in the Introduction to his new life of Keats, that ‘the lives of all important writers need to be reconsidered at regular intervals, no matter how familiar they might be’: The Keats that has come down to us is finely ...”

“... Dylan Thomas’s biographers have mostly thought of him as a big baby – ‘infantile’ is Andrew Lycett’s preferred word, though he has others – who was nothing like as good as he should have been; and whose life, a terrible thing with all its fecklessness and boozing and blathering, was redeemed only by the extraordinary things that were his ...”

“... House of Adams’ is ‘buried’ and ‘beyond recovery’. History in the guise of Andrew Jackson and U.S. Grant had seen to that. Ancestral traits presaged the family’s decline. The Adamses had good reason to think well of themselves (they had ‘held in succession every position of dignity and power their nation could give’), but they ...”

“... poems it’s a different matter. ‘Above Tooey Mountain’, for example, interweaves letters from Hopkins, James Joyce’s mother and Sir James Melville with the poet’s own experience of motherhood: the pay-off is too much like an Ian Hamilton poem (arms damp with flowers ‘from holding them so long’), but the narrative leaps and elisions make this a ...”

“... Twenty​ years ago, Andrew Motion, one of Philip Larkin’s literary executors, wrote a scholarly and comprehensive authorised biography of the poet, whom he had known well; it was subtitled ‘A Writer’s Life’. Motion informed his readers that some important ingredients of Larkin’s life were still unavailable, especially most of the letters written to Monica Jones, a lecturer at the University of Leicester, who was his closest companion and lover, but never wife ...”

“... cheerful philistine parody: ‘I am the batsman and the bat,/I am the bowler and the ball,’ as Andrew Lang put it, sending up Emerson. Thomas once told Treece that ‘I think a squirrel stumbling at least of equal importance as Hitler’s invasions, murders in Spain, the Garbo-Stokowski romance, royalty, Horlicks, lynch law, pit disasters, Joe ...”

“... of, but it also means that Britain is never much further than ‘nine meals from anarchy’, as Andrew Simms, head of the New Economics Foundation, put it.A sudden disruption, caused by extreme weather, or an energy crisis, would leave a government depending on the expertise of the supermarkets, currently servicing a Byzantine consumer choice model, to get ...”

“... Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, he was happiest lecturing in the US: first at Johns Hopkins, then at Yale with Paul de Man, and finally at Irvine and NYU. Thanks not least to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s 1976 translation of Of Grammatology, he had become a star in the American academy. His style of reading was widely, if not always ...”

“... when it eventually came back to Stonyhurst it must have been seen if not worn by Gerard Manley Hopkins, who taught there. A propos Henry VII, what happened between 1485 and 1500? How did bold Harry Tudor of Bosworth Field turn into the crabbed penny-pinching accountant that is his usual representation? 24 March. A film beginning with a man being shepherded ...”