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“... In​  The Dream Colony, a memoir published posthumously in 2017, the gallerist and curator Walter Hopps mentions his first meeting with Andy Warhol, in New York in 1961, when Warhol was a successful commercial artist looking for a way out. ‘We agreed to keep in touch and see what came along. And what came along … were the 32 original Campbell’s Soup Cans ...”

“... For Sir Thomas Browne it was a commonplace that ‘the number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live.’ But this is no longer necessarily true, as has been pointed out in these pages before now: there may be more people living now than all the people who have ever died. With over 5.4 billion of us alive today, on course to become 8.5 billion by 2025, we must think of the outnumbering dead as outnumbered – at least until population slows (at perhaps ten billion, perhaps 15 billion) some sixty years hence ...”

“... Any life​ of A.E. Housman is an assemblage of the already known and the well documented. Housman’s stage-management of his reputation was as controlled as his quatrains, and the mask of reserve – assumed directly after he inexplicably failed his finals in Greats at Oxford – became a perfected gesture, a way of being in the world structured as a renunciation ...”

“... You​ ought to be in a kindergarten,’ a Canadian nurse exclaimed to David Jones, aged twenty, awaiting transfer home in July 1916 after being wounded in Mametz Wood. Even a decade later, photographs show a wary child or an understudy for an adult. Prudence Pelham, the staunchest of his extended female fellowship, described him as ‘completely unsexed ...”

“... In​ ‘Some Remarks on a Case of Obsessive-Compulsive Neurosis’, Freud’s case history of the Rat Man (real name: Ernst Lanzer), there is an account of Lanzer’s attempts to repay a debt, or rather his attempt to describe his attempts to do so. While a reserve officer on military exercises, he loses his pince-nez and sends a telegram to his optician in Vienna ...”

“... commerce between them can begin. Brevity acquired new powers, allied to quickness and lightness. Paul Valéry described Voltaire’s contes as ‘those peerless miracles of rapidity, energy and terrible fantasy … nimble and cruel works, where satire, opera, ballet and ideology are joined in an irresistible rhythm’. Some of the Penguin contes seem locked ...”

“... irrational act seem rational’). ‘The last 18 years like a bad Dostoevsky novel,’ he wrote to Paul Elmer More in June 1933, on the cusp of his separation from Vivien. In an essay of 1924 he remarked that Dostoevsky’s characters are aware of ‘the grotesque futility of their visible lives, and seem always to be listening for other voices’, which ...”

“... contain nearly a hundred thousand pages of manuscript material. The vast Collected Poems edited by Paul Keegan and published in 2003 presents a poet who insistently ‘o’erflows the measure’, to borrow a phrase from Antony and Cleopatra, veering, rather like Shakespeare’s Antony, between the sublime and the bathetic, the uncannily sure-footed and ...”

“... And if you know of any impediments, either of consanguinity, affinity or spiritual relationship, or of any other reason why these two should not be joined in holy matrimony, you are bound to declare the same to us as soon as possible.’ As a child, hearing the banns read out in church, I used to wonder idly what kind of ‘other reason’ there might be ...”

“... was filmed in the same street in Los Angeles as the original. ‘One of cinema’s discoveries,’ Paul Keegan writes in his introduction to a new edition of Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life, ‘was that everyday life is repetition – as if our actions are constantly trying to remember something – and it turned this to account in the figure ...”

“... British Academy when the Penguin and Oxford anthologies of English verse edited respectively by Paul Keegan and Christopher Ricks appeared. Like their predecessors, they exclude most of the Middle Ages; feature no work (even in translation) from Latin, Old English or French; and co-opt Irish, Scottish, Welsh and American verse as ‘English’. Since ...”

“... Hale were never simply private. Writing about their correspondence in the LRB of 22 October 2020, Paul Keegan highlighted a remark from Eliot’s lecture on ‘Letters of the English Poets’ (1933):The desire to write a letter, to put down what you don’t want anybody else to see but the person you are writing to, but which yet you do not want to be ...”

“... comes from the yearning for this second activity to survive, undiminished, in the first. Paul Keegan, for example, in his introduction to The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, follows Bruno Bettelheim in complaining about versions of Freud’s Fehlleistung, his word for what we know as a ‘slip’. It’s true that the German word is a fine ...”

“... from it – but they’ve fallen away from the natural world and been reassigned to human beings. Paul Keegan put this well in a remark about the changing temper of ‘nature writing’ in recent years. ‘The threatening in nature,’ he wrote, ‘has been exchanged for the idea of nature under threat’ (LRB, 20 July 1995). At the same time, ...”