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“... Depending​ where you look, the William Burroughs centenary has either occasioned an outpouring of variously celebratory and carping prose, or a trickle of grudging acknowledgment in outlets thought to speak for the literary establishment. Writing on anything of passing public interest triggers an online avalanche of ad hominem posturing which quickly renders the original topic, whatever it was, numbingly opaque ...”

“... on screen, and stopped hiring men who were bald or had acne. (According to the memoir of William Sullivan, one of his deputies, an agent who lost his hair after he’d been hired wouldn’t be sacked, but would be ‘kept out of the public eye’.)The misleadingly named ‘crime records division’ of the bureau became a public relations ...”

“... Bogart was born on Christmas Day, 1899. Lauren Bacall died on 12 August 2014. So the span of William Mann’s well-researched dual biography is some 115 years. But a case can be made that the ‘greatest love affair’ promised by Mann amounted to no more than 216 minutes in the busy years of the mid-1940s. That’s the combined duration of To Have and ...”

“... they might produce. Someone once described the poems of the late Oscar (not to be confused with William Carlos) Williams as ‘poems written by a typewriter on a typewriter’ – Oscar Williams must be one of the great influences in contemporary poetry. In England and America there are, I suppose, at most five to ten thousand readers of poetry, but there ...”

“... shared in the 1970s and early 1980s. In February 1974 the head of the home civil service, Sir William Armstrong, suffered a dramatic nervous breakdown in Downing Street, convinced that democracy itself was at stake in the miners’ confrontation with Ted Heath’s government. When Armstrong’s colleague Sir Douglas Allen, the permanent secretary at the ...”

“... writer who insisted she could find subjects anywhere; and the partner of her American-born husband William Blake: these were the ways in which she identified herself. ‘We never thought of having a home: home was where the other was.’ When ‘the other’ died, but not until, she went back to Australia. She arrived back just at the right moment to be ...”

“... from an Institution, that coruscating but already time-haunted novel which allegedly put Mary McCarthy on the spot. Jarrell himself discounted this, claiming hardly to know her: but Philip Rahv at Partisan, who knew her much better, politely declined to print any of the novel, and Jarrell replied by sending him no further articles or poems. Gertrude is ...”

“... he wasn’t such a damn hick’. Hick or not, he was considered dangerous enough. He funded Joseph McCarthy, and Lyndon Johnson wasn’t joking when he told a colleague that he believed Hunt was responsible for inciting the riots in Newark and Detroit in 1964: he thought the tycoon was trying to derail the passage of civil rights legislation. Hunt launched an ...”

“... sense, though, Edinburgh did adopt him. His talents took him to the Royal High School, where William Drummond, Henry Mackenzie and Walter Scott had been before him. There Karl became favourite pupil and close friend of Hector MacIver, that incomparable teacher of literature, who recognised his gifts and took him with his other clever boys down the Calton ...”

“... quarterly called Forum, and set about publishing everyone he admired, including Walker Percy, William Gass and the not yet famous Marshall McLuhan. In 1960, he joined the board of Houston’s Contemporary Arts Association and the following year became the museum’s temporary director. He remained there for just over a year. It was a period of ...”

“... In April 1792, William Pitt, the ‘heaven-born minister’ as his Tory supporters liked to call him, made what we can now recognise as one of the first of many attempts to cast off the perception that the Tories are the nasty party. The slave trade, he told the Commons, was ‘the greatest practical evil that ever has afflicted the human race’, and a ‘stigma on our national character ...”

“... Colleagues shunned him; the FBI investigated him; congressional subcommittees harassed him; and William F. Buckley taunted him with nicknames like ‘Sherbert Matthews’. He also received death threats from Cuban exiles in Miami, and once had to flee a platform at the University of New Mexico because the local police believed there might be a bomb in the ...”

“... relationship, is often taken retroactively as a political parable – an attack on those in the McCarthy period who ‘named names’ – yet the heart of the drama lies in its depiction of the girl’s shocking misogyny and its dire consequences. (One of the teachers commits suicide.) In the early Eighties Hellman got embroiled in her own ugly mess when ...”

“... United States, the one she had been reading since she was a teenager. Its editors, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, no longer worked in tandem as they had in the old days; Phillips alone discovered Sontag and took her up as a representative and promising young writer. He memorably misassigned her to the journal’s theatre column, the post that had been held ...”

“... of an emergent conservative movement.In particular, the Eisenhower letter provided an opening for William F. Buckley, the founder-editor of the National Review, to establish some distance between the honest-to-goodness hard right and deluded fantasists like Welch. Although Welch gave financial support to the National Review in 1955, he received little in ...”