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“... teaching, and which might therefore be approved without apparent inconsistency. Second, Pope John XXIII, elected in 1958 as a ‘caretaker’ pontiff, had surprised everyone by encouraging Catholics to re-examine many aspects of their faith previously regarded as sacrosanct. In 1962 he called for a second Vatican Council to reinterpret the Catholic faith ...”

“... at least, some of the most thoughtful and independent observers would persuade us. One of them is John Felstiner, whose book about Neruda was reviewed in LRB a few weeks back by Christopher Reid.1 Felstiner some years ago wrote an essay that I for my part found arresting and persuasive, in which he argued – largely on the evidence of directions taken by ...”

“... than in visual art – we can trace it explicitly, as Stanley Weintraub has done, through Lawrence and Faulkner. In the art world we must wait till the Sixties, for the appearance of Hockney and Warhol. Beardsley had no use for futurism or the machine aesthetic or abstract art. He loathed Turner, the founder of the colouristic sublime, comparing him ...”

“... isn’t the first fictional character to train for a supernaturally revealed task. The hero of John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany, for instance, must master a particular basketball shot in order to fulfil his destiny by saving a group of children. It may be that the literary form best suited to dramatising forks in the road, paths taken and not ...”

“... guzzlers of experience (Walt Whitman, Henry Miller, the Beats, and that honorary American, D.H. Lawrence); palefaces, the tightly-buttoned patrician ministers of culture, society and manners (William Dean Howells, Henry James, T. S. Eliot). Although Moody tries to ride the wild surf of incantation, he’s a paleface from a long line of palefaces. If he were ...”

“... that it was, somehow, their home. Johann Burckhardt, William Thomson (known as Osman effendi), John Gardner Wilkinson, Robert Hay and Edward Lane also ‘went native’ on their travels. Like Champollion, they aped the robes and turbans of the Ottoman ruling class, browned their skin, and made a show of living in ‘Oriental’ style. Hay, Burton and ...”

“... he confessed his feelings. The women closest to him – aside from his mother – were Gertrude Lawrence, Marlene Dietrich and the ‘stylish, hot-tempered’ bisexual Gladys Calthrop, whom he met when she sat in the front row of his show at the English Club in Alassio and disrupted the performance with fits of giggles. As in Design for Living, which he ...”

“... a twenty-year sentence for armed robbery. Himes had already seen his share of troubles but, as Lawrence Jackson writes in his impressive biography, they ‘did not inspire him’ the way that ‘stumbling through the gore of two cell block tiers’ worth of burned-alive men’ did. After the fire, Himes began to write fiction on a typewriter he had bought ...”

“... seems quickly to have revived. Of these later stories he was rightly more confident, telling T.E. Lawrence that ‘Dr Woolacott’ was ‘the best thing I’ve done’. At the end of the ‘Sex’ memoir Forster at nearly 85 felt the need to add: ‘How annoyed I am with Society for wasting my time by making homosexuality criminal. The subterfuges, the ...”

“... past have done. Some of them are already bringing up families and they are still “beat”,’ Lawrence Lipton writes in The Holy Barbarians, a passage that always comes to mind when I see pictures of Berlin dangling her sons against various backyards, parks, untamed beaches. The first time I read her stories I felt inexplicably lonely, and then realised ...”

“... live, no more than that: a stopover. How did William Burroughs finish up in a clapboard cabin in Lawrence, Kansas, with his brood of sleek, well-fed felines? The old man mumbled something unconvincing about property prices. Why did the quintessentially English Michael Moorcock nominate the second Confederate governor of Texas’s mansion in Bastrop, thirty ...”

“... follows a remarkable passage: ‘Among the neglected men I have found Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter ...”

“... because of her interest in folklore and her knowledge of the area around Coole and its people. ‘John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought/All that we did, all that we said or sang/Must come from contact with the soil.’ Much of Yeats’s work on Irish folklore was, as Foster points out, a collaboration with Lady Gregory.Lady Gregory also wrote ...”

“... though I’d have thought the chances of him persuading his mamma to come are pretty slim. John Gielgud was once telling me about Mrs Simpson and how smart she was. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘she’d have made a disastrous queen. Didn’t go to the theatre at all.’ 19 January. Alan Bates opens tonight at the Barbican in the RSC production of Antony ...”

“... Thomas’s death the family fractured. Frances ran away, abandoning the children to her parents, John and Alice Jennings. When she reappeared two months later it was to take over the lease on the Moorfields stables and transfer it to her new young husband, William Rawlings. Her parents watched as she drove their once prosperous business into the ...”