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“... the great Ellington protégé, was living there – presumably composing – in the 1990s. James Schuyler arrived in 1979 and wrote out his last years there. The Chelsea’s presiding spirit in the 19th century was Philip Gengembre Hubert, the son of a French Fourierist who took him to America as the New World phalansteries were breaking up. Hubert, a ...”

“... their own intertexts and in its margins ammunition to challenge the assumptions of their betters. James I detested it – ‘saucy to princes’ was his judgment on its notes – so he ensured that the 1611 Authorised Version contained no interpretative notes at all, which may be one reason it took two generations for the AV to displace it in the hearts and ...”

“... performance in France and Belgium in the First World War has received mixed reviews. General Sir James Edmonds, editor of the official history of the war, declared Allenby’s record on the Western Front ‘one of gross stupidity from first to last’. On the other hand, Colonel Repington, the influential military correspondent of the Times, pronounced him ...”

“... a type of celebrity now.’ He contrasts Ledger, who died three years ago at the age of 28, with James Dean, who died 55 years ago at the age of 24 and became the standard against which all young, handsome, would-be acting geniuses in Hollywood are measured. It’s not only, Thomson says, that Ledger wasn’t the actor Dean was. It’s that movies, and their ...”

“... in Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight in 1932. Ginger Rogers is rightly praised for Roxie Hart, Carole Lombard for Twentieth Century, Irene Dunne for The Awful Truth, Rosalind Russell for His Girl Friday. Apart from these recognised talents, which even a dullard can assess correctly just by agreeing with everybody else, there are unrecognised talents ...”

“... as John Quincy Adams described it in 1823. In imitation of British freelance imperialists such as James Brooke, the ‘white rajah’ who ruled the state of Sarawak on Borneo as a private fiefdom in the mid-19th century, America produced its own brand of freebooters, including William Walker, the Tennessee doctor who conquered and ruled Nicaragua for ten ...”

“... her celebrity. By the age of 16 Emy Lyon had become, with a touch of novelistic symbolism, Emily Hart. She was also pregnant, ‘thrown over by a rich lover’, and desperate until she found another protector. There is by now an odd ambiguity in Emma’s status: like Moll Flanders, she is available for sexual exploitation because that is the only way in ...”

“... to her own brother. Others, less sure of themselves, fall through the cracks. Lucia Joyce, James Joyce’s troubled daughter, given to ‘acting up, setting her hair on fire’, is packed off to Switzerland to be ‘stilled, in a straitjacket’. Hazel, Peggy’s younger sister (always late, forgetful, bewildered), ends up in a New York institution ...”

“... long perspectives open out, into white light, into the infinite’, bringing to mind Hart Crane’s New York with its chastening vistas. This is also Auden’s spurious, glorious New York, and he is here on backing vocals (‘poetry makes nothing happen’), in person on Middagh Street, and in Sullivan’s willingness to reach for the bracingly ...”

“... death finished off his father. He had punished the wrong son. The institution in which the young James Carew O’Gorman Anderson took up his post in 1914 had been in existence for nearly fifty years. By then it had no parallel anywhere in the world. Its origins lay in the crisis of the Ch’ing Empire in the mid-19th century, when the Taiping Rebellion gave ...”

“... post-Smartian Seatonian to have arrested his attention previously was The Ascension (1780) by one James Atkins, which he defiantly published after failing to win the prize – ‘for several Reasons’, as one of the judges had grimly told him, which no doubt included his whimsical theology and misguided decision to write in seven-syllable blank ...”

“... Hart Crane, for one, was in no doubt about it. ‘He’s the prime ram of our flock,’ he insisted to Allen Tate in the summer of 1922. Tate was initially puzzled by the phrase, as well as by various other ‘signals’ his friend was making, but eventually came to understand Crane’s drift: ‘In those days,’ he later commented, ‘a lot of people like Hart had the delusion that Eliot was homosexual ...”

“... he wrote, than Siegfried Sassoon, or Edmund Blunden, or Robert Graves, far more than Liddell Hart, four or five times as much as Wilfred Owen, and I didn’t go home with a nervous breakdown. [But] I fear the damage is done, and the myth of the 1930s has prevailed … When I meet some clever young scholar from Queen’s or Keble who has written on WWI ...”

“... verse. This nostrum begs many questions, but it remains a good rule-of-thumb. By this test, Clive James is a true poet. Line after line of his has a characteristic personal tone, a kind of end-stopped singingness which is almost independent of what it says. The following are taken at random from Other Passports: Like injured ozone to angelic wings ...”

“... Speculation, Leon Edel remarks in his one-volume life of Henry James, is ‘the stock-in-trade of all biographers’. But if all biographers speculate, some do so more scrupulously and convincingly than others. Edel, for instance, is both meticulous and plausible. The same can hardly be said of Martin Seymour-Smith in his new critical biography of Kipling ...”