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“... fit of morality: you get the sense that maybe too much of a fuss is about to be made of something. Sylvia Murphy’s knowledge is, to start with, not abstract at all, since it refers to a kind of encyclopedia or dictionnaire des idées reçues. All of these titles point to something about the book in question, I suppose, but none quite hits its central ...”

“... Penguin Contemporary American Poetry exactly a month before she killed herself early in 1963, Sylvia Plath praised ‘the inwardness of these images ... the uncanny faculty of melting through the leaves of the wallpaper, through the dark looking-glass, into a world which one can only call surrealist and irrational’. It was a process she could see ...”

“... me? The fields are mined and the night is long; Stick with me when the shooting starts. Richard Murphy is not a reckless poet. Those who rate him surely rate him much too highly. Ted Hughes compliments him with the anti-reckless word ‘classical’ and with ‘the gift of epic objectivity’, and Seamus Heaney praises his ‘poised and appeased ...”

“... and ‘Letter from a Far Country’, where much is said by leaving the rest unsaid. Richard Murphy, too, leaves a good deal unsaid. The price of stone is high, apparently, but he hasn’t computed it in detail; we are meant to leap from one assessment to the next. To begin with, it is the price of trying to build a house in granite, and then of trying ...”

“... of three now almost forgotten lesbian women: the American heiress and intellectual polymath Esther Murphy (1897-1962); Mercedes de Acosta (1893-1968), the Cuban-American Hollywood screenwriter, memoirist and seductress extraordinaire (Garbo and Dietrich and Isadora Duncan were among her conquests); and the brittle yet pioneering British fashion editor and ...”

“... in presenting the case. But the main issue seems to be her hair. (The series producer, Ryan Murphy, is the magician who brought us the hard-hitting high-school documentary series, Glee.) The onscreen Clark comes to be fully known in episode five, when, regardless of what actually happened to her real-world equivalent, she comes home exhausted on a ...”

“... Plath that are the outstanding feature of this volume. The first letter (March 1956) is very brief:Sylvia,That night was nothing but getting to know how smooth your body is. The memory of it goes through me like brandy.If you do not come to London to me, I shall come to Cambridge to you. I shall be in London, here, until the 14th.Enjoy ParisTed.And bring back ...”

“... girls’. In A522 Bernard Shaw, declining to contribute money for the publication of Ulysses, told Sylvia Beach: ‘I take care of the pence because the pounds won’t take care of themselves.’ In B507 he tells her: ‘I take care of the pence and let the Pounds take care of themselves.’ A527 has Joyce writing to Alessandro Francini: ‘I’ve become a ...”

“... 14 May 1752: ‘In his own time Timothy Dwight was a figure of towering significance.’ Arthur Murphy, born in Clomquin, Roscommon, 27 December 1727: his comedy The Upholsterer was produced in 1758, Alzuma in 1773. And while we are on the drama, let us remember James Robinson Planché, born in Piccadilly, London on 27 February 1796, who is part of the ...”

“... in the late Fifties in Primrose Hill. ‘I saw the druids at their work, that was great.’ Unlike Sylvia Plath, who lodged on the same patch, Corso’s London period was invisible, his poems hidden away in secondhand anthologies. His life as obscure as that of Beckett’s Murphy. Corso’s sage green novel, The American ...”

“... Garfield, Ava Gardner, Judy Garland, Henry Hathaway, Van Heflin, Fritz Lang, Burt Lancaster, Audie Murphy, Burgess Meredith, Groucho Marx, Vincente Minnelli, Gregory Peck, Vincent Price, Robert Ryan, Edward G. Robinson, Donna Reed, Nicholas Ray, Robert Siodmak, Frank Sinatra, Sylvia Sidney, Claire Trevor, Franchot ...”

“... publication of Finnegans Wake, Jolas was one of the editorial entrepreneurs of Modernism; like Sylvia Beach and Harriet Shaw Weaver, a supporting player in the long-running and bloody saga of publishing Joyce that is central to the myth of the modern. Reminiscences of Joyce (or ‘Jouasse’) in his self-imposed ‘exile’, provide some of the sharpest ...”

“... had to be managed as best they could.‘Any fool can turn the blind eye,’ Samuel Beckett says in Murphy (1938), a novel set in part in the Bethlem Royal Hospital near Croydon. The hospital had recently transferred to an airy new site in Beckenham when Beckett’s friend Geoffrey Thompson got a job there as a house physician in 1935. ...”