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“... The only time I stayed at the Chelsea Hotel, a few years ago, I kept thinking about Gilbert Sorrentino’s Splendide-Hôtel (1973), a slim volume of meditations, 27 in all, organised from A to Z – a segment per letter, plus one for good measure. Sorrentino took his cue from a line in Rimbaud’s Illuminations: ‘And the Hôtel Splendide was built in the chaos of ice and polar night ...”

“... The letter is dated 1627, so there may be a joke here rather than an error. Still, I don’t think we need to see Joyce as being disingenuous – David Greetham wonders about this in an essay in a booklet accompanying the new edition of Finnegans Wake – since we know what he could do with bits and scraps. In his letter he ...”

“... drinking and listening to music ... I drain my glass and take the phones off. Behind me sits Stephen Sinclair on the lazy chair. He was crashed out with drink and drugs. I sit and look at him. I stand up and approach him. My heart is pounding. I kneel down in front of him. I touch his leg and say: ‘Are you awake?’ There is no response. ‘Oh ...”

“... as they waited, others were inclined to show off their knowledge. I overheard phrases: ‘When we were in New Zealand,’ ‘When we were in Cape Town.’ ‘Of course, sperm whales are usually well out into the Atlantic.’ It’s true that sperm whales are deep-sea animals and it’s highly unusual to have one ...”

“... designs, festooned with pedestals, arches, fountains, domes and columns. The seventh came from Gilbert Scott, still smarting from the snub administered to his Foreign Office designs by Palmerston, and was a Gothic extravaganza, loosely based on 13th-century market crosses, and lavishly coated with Puginesque fantasy. It won the day, and by so doing assured ...”

“... for his meticulous standards and his appalling sarcasms on the unscholarly, delivered the Leslie Stephen Lecture on ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’. In the course of it he quoted ‘O mistress mine, where are you roaming?’ and he quoted it as ‘where art thou roaming?’ He had omitted to verify his memory of something so well-known. He silently put ...”

“... affected elaborate politeness as a form of arrogance, and whom his exasperated friend Stuart Gilbert finally compared to Adolf Hitler. This is the Joyce portrayed in Gilbert’s Paris Journal, in the memory of many of Ellmann’s interviewees and the photographs of Gisele Freund. When one looks through this prism, it ...”

“... Man, lived at 7 Eccles Street from 1908 to 1910. ‘In 1909, when Joyce was visiting Dublin,’ we are told on page 1144 of the new volume of annotations to Ulysses, ‘he returned with his friend J.F. Byrne late at night to Byrne’s house at 7 Eccles Street,’ only to find that Byrne had forgotten his key. In his memoirs, quoted here, Byrne wrote: ‘I ...”

“... the Restoration, when many judged discretion the better part of valour, the pre-eminent churchman Gilbert Sheldon supported Wren’s work at Oxford, then got him a decisive advisory role at St Paul’s before its (rather fortunate) destruction in the Great Fire. Wren gratefully named his firstborn son Gilbert. He might then ...”

“... claim their equipment was so bad they couldn’t hear what Curtis was saying, though the drummer, Stephen Morris, still wonders how they missed the desperation. When they recorded Unknown Pleasures in the studio in April 1979, the band must have been able to hear the lyrics more clearly, but they preferred not to think about what lay behind them. Sumner says ...”

“... were the porters) he failed to win a permanent place. Tonks took him on at the Slade (‘If we were commercial gents we’d get this fellow to sign on the dotted line ... We’d make a money spinner out of him’). Finding him ‘pencilling away with his back to the model,’ Tonks ...”

“... Why do we enjoy tragedy? It may be thought that our best hope of answering this question lies in the psychology of Freud, who disclosed the dark side of the psyche. Behind this darkening of the mind, however, there lies another darkening, of our picture of the ancient sources of European literature. Antiquity, formerly given over to the Ego, becomes the province of the Id ...”

“... taking account of the literary attitudes expressed in the London Introductory and Leslie Stephen Lectures. The author of such a study would find it helpful to have some understanding of the scholarly work which was the main business of Housman’s life, since the relation of this activity to his poetry is of great interest. Mr Graves quotes copiously ...”

“... blend of fashion, art, commerce and academic analysis that marks the current cultural scene. How we dress now is a subject that engages semioticians, social historians, political analysts and gender theorists – ‘fashion civilians’, in the words of Colette’s biographer Judith Thurman – as well as superstar designers, magazine editors, high-spending ...”

“... by its promise of wealth, and the rich bought up tracts of land to build their summer houses. Gilbert van Schoonbeke, a major developer in these years, was said to be such a crook that he didn’t have ‘a single hair on his body that he hadn’t acquired by theft’. As Houghton discovered, the ‘For Sale’ sign nailed to Aertsen’s meat stall was a ...”