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“... it.’ Yeats had in mind his friends of the Nineties, especially Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson and Arthur Symons, poets who had awakened from the vulgarity of ‘the common dream’ – as Yeats calls it in ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ – at the cost of falling into ‘dissipation and despair’. As a reader of Yeats, I felt obliged to think of his friends as ...”

“... news of his romance with Jessica Lange, whom he was then partnering in Country, had just broken. Arthur Miller’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe had caught the headlines in the past, but to get the girl and join the top league of male box-office stars at the same time was a new story. There was much dissection of Shepard’s life-style, the subtleties of his ...”

“... by mad Scientologists – were about getting out of the place, slipstreaming the wake of Van Gogh, Rimbaud and W.G. Sebald.Close to my temporary perch in the respectably decadent afternoon hotel which seemed to be favoured by poets and covert couples, some of whom would slide through the door behind the bar, was the church of Notre-Dame du Finistère, which ...”

“... of illusions or prejudices for another. Robb, who has written fine biographies of Balzac, Hugo and Rimbaud, is most at home in the 19th century, but he doesn’t subscribe to that century’s certainties about progress, or to the Paris-centred vision of those who, like Baudelaire, opposed the period’s shibboleths. At times, The Discovery of France resembles ...”

“... however tense their temporary engagements with such figures as Denis, the layabout disciple of Rimbaud, Pascal, the uncommitted archaeologist, and Marie-Ange, the crypto-lesbian theosophist. Only in ‘Chantal’ does the technical range expand, allowing a rich and piquant contrast to emerge between the flowery journal entries of the newly-arrived teacher ...”

“... my reputation as an apologist but also because in conversation I’d once casually referred to Rimbaud as a ‘gay poet’, which had profoundly shocked my editor. Whereas I can understand the French reluctance to quarantine literature – a position I sympathise with in some ways on certain days – I can’t tolerate the reflex that bans all references ...”

“... still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words. Arthur Scargill, Sunday Times, 10 January 1982 Next millennium you’ll have to search quite hard to find my slab behind the family dead, butcher, publican, and baker, now me, bard adding poetry to their beef, beer and bread. With Byron three graves on I’ll ...”

“... modernities, even when the demand for the New is most strident, as, for instance, in Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Kandinsky. However, it is now taken for granted in some circles that there was something qualitatively different about our modernity; that there was a decisive coupure around 1870 (the date varies), or that a wholly original understanding of linguistic ...”

“... there after demobilisation, in 1919, to resume his part in a quartet of friendship with Howells, Arthur Benjamin and Arthur Bliss. His siblings had also to contend with his burgeoning fame, which they did not understand: two published volumes of poetry (1917 and 1919); much performance and publication of music ...”

“... move up a class was tested by their ability to swim the Avon fully clothed, write a critique of an Arthur Ransome book, climb the Tracker Tree, or spend a night alone in the woods and write about the experience. Classes were voluntary: a young radio buff who had chosen not to learn arithmetic finally begged the music master to teach him long division so that ...”

“... wore suits and ties. I’d read the free-wheeling interviews in fugitive magazines, such as Arthur and Kit Knight’s The Beat Diary. I’d clocked Corso, along with the other survivors, on the conference circuit. Bearded, lived-in faces confronted by batteries of microphones – as if on trial, undergoing public McCarthyite ...”

“... flow of books, films and other media. When Dreyer made his extraordinary film in 1928, and Arthur Honegger and Paul Claudel composed the oratorio Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher ten years later, both were working in the light of modern wars and prejudice. And their works are prophetic: the civil war in 15th-century France presages the treacheries both of the ...”