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“... people!’ The usual suspects, or most of them, were on board – Stevens, Eliot, Crane, Pound, Williams, there was even a poem of Lowell’s – but not with their standard anthology pieces. About 80 per cent of Thom’s choices either had Eros in the title or were directly concerned with the troublesome deity. Nearly half the poets in the collection were ...”

“... a dilettante and in the doldrums about cracking the code of American musical success, Porter told Richard Rodgers: ‘I’ll write Jewish tunes.’ In Porter’s shift to the heavily chromatic minor key with its unmistakable Mediterranean flavour, he found a rhythmic correlative which engineered the crossover to Broadway. ‘It is surely one of the ironies of ...”

“... of ‘contemporary art’: Nicholas Serota (at the Tate), Charles Saatchi, Sarah Kent (Time Out), Richard Dorment (Daily Telegraph, oddly enough). Against: Modern Painters, Brian Sewell (Evening Standard), Giles Auty (Spectator), Glynn Williams (at the RCA) and any number of Johnsonian or Waugh-like commentators who throw ...”

“... out in a group of ambitious black male writers who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked ...”

“... between the orchestra and the conductor, Hans von Bülow, grew strained: Franz Strauss, father of Richard and the brilliant first horn of the Munich orchestra, had a blazing row with von Bülow, stomped out of the pit and had to be coaxed back. Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, who sang Tristan to his wife’s Isolde, caught a chill on stage and subsequently ...”

“... week. 15 April. I have given all my literary archive to the Bodleian Library and this afternoon Richard Ovenden, the keeper of special collections, comes round to load up the hundred or so box files and take them to Oxford. There will be more in due course, including all my notebooks and the annotated copies of the printed stuff, but I’m very happy to see ...”

“... author to a little thing he was hosting. Who was there? Oh, you know, the usual crew: Tennessee Williams, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, and Hemingway’s great chum, the one he called ‘the Kraut’: Marlene Dietrich. ‘You could have knocked me over with a pin,’ Styron wrote to his aunt Edith, ‘when Leo took me over to meet Dietrich and she took ...”

“... Topic [A], with Tina Brown, which created its own buzz by having Hendrik Hertzberg and Armstrong Williams slug it out about whether or not it mattered that Kerry had been 100 yards from the Vietnam border while Bush was 14 million yards away (Hertzberg had worked it out). But the parties turned out to be more noisy than buzzy, more shouty than noisy, more ...”

“... were didactic – ‘one of the things they were about was the indisposability of plastic.’ Richard Deacon, who is with Cragg ‘the most expensive, the most written about, the best patronised ... of the new British sculptural establishment’, makes startling hybrids: ‘To produce one of his small sculptures an old brass navigational aid must have ...”

“... The new generation of ‘cultural materialists’, however (the term is borrowed from Raymond Williams, who contributes an afterword), are much more suspicious of ‘high culture’. In his introduction to Political Shakespeare, Jonathan Dollimore analyses a tripartite pattern in ideological conflicts of consolidation, subversion and containment. In ...”

“... argument, as there are, however, in recent alternatives to it. In his Shelley: The Pursuit (1974) Richard Holmes decided that both Claire and Elise had been pregnant by Shelley, that Claire’s pregnancy had aborted, and Elena was Elise’s baby. Claire Tomalin, in Shelley and His World (1980) argued more reasonably that the child was Claire’s; and in a ...”

“... visit her in Cornwall, where she was living with Cecil Gray, a musicologist, while her husband, Richard Aldington, was serving on the Western Front. H.D. thought the writer was an elderly schoolmistress: she got a surprise when the 24-year-old millionaire’s daughter turned up. Souhami compares their meeting to the moment when Beach’s hat flew off in the ...”

“... neutralists make substantial moral claims. To defend the two-face schema, Gray could say, echoing Richard Rorty, that there’s the bit where neutralists say it, and then there’s the bit where they take it back. ‘It’ here is the neutralists’ claim that they avoid controversial moral ideals. But then they take this claim back, relying on a moral ideal ...”

“... repressive figure of Joachim – though it does help one to understand the shock-waves caused by Richard Strauss, rocking the boat with solecisms, crudities, reckless infringements of instrumental propriety, general vulgarity and callowness, and troubling Tovey the chaste grammarian and self-appointed guardian of the sacred Teutonic flame. (But he doesn’t ...”

“... nor the romantic, nostalgic impulse in British architecture could easily be eradicated.’ Clough Williams-Ellis’s Portmeirion, which somehow escaped being tarred as kitsch, linked architects and writers of opposing tastes in delighted admiration, provided they didn’t look too closely.As Andrew Saint​ has observed, among the first colonisers of the no ...”