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“... vital parts. Another flamboyant, scandal-lapped, self-dramatising monstre sacrée surfaces in Joy Melville’s Mother of Oscar, a life of Lady Wilde, once famous as ‘Speranza’, the seditious Dublin belle of the potato famine. Born Jane Elgee, she too ran amok in the Classics and fantasised about her ancestors. In the late 1840s she wrote ...”

“... 1704-9), off the coast of Chile. One of the Acushnet’s fo’c’sle crew was the young Herman Melville. The two ships hove to for a few hours while their masters visited each other, and the 22-year-old Melville caught sight of the Wirt’s captain. He was impressed: ‘He was a large, powerful, well-made man; rather ...”

“... by the suffering of others, as Lucretius explains in a famous passage. In this translation, A joy it is, when the strong winds of storm Stir up the waters of a mighty sea, To watch from the shore the troubles of another – not, as the poet explains in the next lines, from sadism, but because the philosopher is fortified by an irrefragable ...”

“... going to be allowed to do anything of the kind again.’ Yet he was pleased with his handiwork: ‘Joy of joys to anyone, and particularly a Jew, the satisfaction of knowing that they had directly and specifically fooled that monster.’ He estimated the cost of Operation Mincemeat, which saved thousands of Allied lives in a conquest that took only 38 rather ...”

“... light on the pure actual. (No such thing as the body,) Fact of a wrist. Vein troubling a forehead. Melville: How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? *                                     (By the waterfountain in the gym) On the huge man’s left arm TRUST above an image he called the god of ...”

“... mentor, John Henslow, Charles Darwin was increasingly anxious to get home: ‘I look forward with joy and interest to [visiting the Galapagos], both as being somewhat nearer to England, & for the sake of having a good look at an active Volcano.’ He had cause to expect some pyrotechnics as the island chain had been produced by continental drift of the ...”

“... the poet with the madness of the mathematician’. Perec in particular constantly invokes Herman Melville: W’s narrator identifies not with ‘Ahab’s boiling fury’ but with the sober and scrupulous Ishmael; the puzzle-making central figure in La Vie mode d’emploi is named ‘Bartlebooth’, splicing together Valery Larbaud’s A.O. Barnabooth and ...”

“... or otherwise slightly sexless versions of it (Vere’s chaste love for Billy replaces what Melville called Claggart’s ‘natural depravity’). And curiously, this very repression then effects a release: Vere’s relation to Billy is more tenderly realised than anything in Melville’s novella (‘But he has ...”

“... the ‘possession’ poets speak of with manic states. Byron, Blake, Coleridge, the Jameses, Melville, Van Gogh and, of course, Virginia Woolf are all tested, by their works and their known heredities, for bipolar illness and the findings are positive. While Jamison acknowledges that ‘there are many artists, writers and composers who are perfectly ...”

“... exactly as it pleases’. Columbus was impressed by the frigatebird and described it in his log; Melville made a poem from one, and the ‘black hawk’ that lifts Ahab’s hat from his head and ominously drops it, far from the Pequod, into the sea, is most likely a frigatebird too. It is not a raptor – the taxonomists have it between cormorants and herons ...”

“... more and more reluctantly. Nor does it matter much that I sometimes have a powerful sense of the joy of invention. The two things seen together can be explained by an acquired facility with metrics that takes away the thrill of digging out the work from a formless mass, and on the other hand by interests arising from ordinary life that add passion and ...”

“... Names for the fog evolved during the 19th century. ‘Pea-souper’ is sometimes attributed to Melville, who wrote in 1850 of encountering ‘the old-fashioned pea soup London fog – of a gamboge colour’. This suggests that the expression was already well-worn. (Corton, given to rather engaging fits of pedantry, here goes off into a disquisition about ...”

“... allowed to accompany my father to an office that was once or twice his place of work, I went with joy as to Santa’s grotto. The office had so much more to engage with than mere roundabouts and swings. The secret beating heart of the dream office is the stationery cupboard, the ideal kind, the one that opens to enough depth to allow you to walk in and close ...”

“... have put them in touch. Olson was then a former federal official, the author of a vivid book about Melville, not yet the theorist, impresario and cult figure of The Maximus Poems. The Olson-Creeley letters now comprise ten published volumes; Olson’s most famous formulation, ‘Form is never more than an extension of content,’ originated in a letter from ...”

“... were less rigid, less patronising and less instrumental – that, in Indigenous America, ‘the joy of nonhuman companionship could be an end in itself.’ As more and more tamed animals were imported to Europe, however, they soon became neither iegue nor precious gifts, but merely tradeable commodities. Some were even sold alongside humans, such as the ...”