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“... work was. Later he made advertising displays and did a little modelling for a hat company. He read a great deal, and made illustrations for Joyce’s Ulysses, which was banned and could only be read at the National Library. He lived for a while in a ‘weekender’ (a cottage in the bush) and tried to stow away on a ...”

“... its success when it opened on Broadway in 1943. In April 1944, the 25-year-olds Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein premiered a cocky, jazzy ballet called Fancy Free, which brought down the house. Its three sailors returned eight months later in On the Town, a balletically free-form Robbins-Bernstein musical set in New York in 1944. Appalachian Spring did not ...”

“... most venerated writer’, Jack Macalister. Present is wife Sarah, who urges those present to read his books, the Macalister girls Dora and Emily, twenty years apart in age, and Jack’s friend and first publisher Charles Bremner, who was also Sarah’s lover. Funeral and reception over, we go back to childhood, when all three main characters grew up in ...”

“... beyond all praise for care and fullness’. At the end of his life it was an open commission from Leonard Rowe Valpy, Ruskin’s solicitor, which gave him the freedom to produce a cycle of landscapes based on ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ – paintings cited by those who wish to find proof that his poetic vision hadn’t faded. They are worth ...”

“... her condition and she turns immediately to the Bible which ‘fell open near the beginning. She read: “And the Lord set a mark upon Cain.” ’ The scar on Stephen’s face (the result of a wartime wound), which becomes livid at times of stress, functions as that mark. Despite Hall’s attempts to court the sympathy of heterosexuals by writing about a ...”

“... such as Polygon and Canongate, writers like Alasdair Gray, Agnes Owens, Thomas Healy, Tom Leonard, James Kelman and Janice Galloway have found the city a congenial location for their life and work, and their success is encouraging others. Of course, Glasgow has always had its writers. Torrington’s late Sixties hero is himself a working-class ...”

“... index – of the Eugenics Society’s Charles Blacker, of Vera Brittain, Cyril Burt, G.D.H Cole, Leonard Darwin, G. Lowes Dickinson, E.M. Forster, Edward Glover, J.A. Hobson, Aldous and Julian Huxley, Storm Jameson, Ernest Jones, Sir Arthur Keith, Maynard Keynes, Archbishop Cosmo Lang, Basil Liddell Hart, Bronislaw Malinowski, Gilbert Murray, Philip ...”

“... in argument, and characterised, in most cases, by long limbs and large spectacles, they struck Leonard Woolf as ‘much the most remarkable family I have ever known’. His wife, on the other hand, who knew several Stracheys well, thought them ‘a prosaic race, lacking magnanimity, shorn of atmosphere’. The direct line has died out now. The family’s ...”

“... his mother said, ‘and gave us a military salute as he disappeared behind the door.’ She had read a piece in the Spectator that described the departing soldiers as modern crusaders, but she felt ‘there is something that they have that no crusader ever had, and it was shining in V.D.’s face today.’ Fernald’s ship docked at Le Havre, from where he ...”

“... of blarney in this passionately articulate novel, which takes certain surreal premises as read in order to conduct its mythic discussion of Irish histories. To grant these premises for the duration of a reading is in this case, as it is not in much ‘playful’ fiction, to be carried with great momentum into an unfamiliar but internally consistent ...”

“... state. The charge that used to be brought against Virginia Woolf was that she was not political. Leonard Woolf contributed to this myth both by saying that she was the most unpolitical person he had known and by publishing her diaries in the form of A Writer’s Diary and cutting out political and social commentary. This conception of the writer, disengaged ...”

“... to each other until Roger Ackerley’s death) and Ackerley’s own sexual problems. I had read it, with great enjoyment, in a proof copy that Nancy had lent me. (Soon afterwards she gave me a bound copy inscribed: ‘Dearest Richard, I know you like this book, and you know I don’t! but here it is with my love, Nance.’) Forster had not liked ...”

“... It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations,’ wrote Sir Winston Churchill in My Early Life. In America this need was famously recognised by the publishers of the Elbert Hubbard Scrap Book, containing the 2,500 greatest thoughts. Hubbard went down in the Lusitania, but his book was advertised with great vigour for the benefit of tongue-tied partygoers who found their fellow guests talking about Nietzsche ...”

“... even cannibalism. The exact proportions of the blending are open to dispute, though few read Homer’s poem as an unadulterated onslaught on war or the heroic ethos. Logue’s imitation comes close to being that. It is naggingly satirical, like an Iliad rewritten by Thersites. Logue begins with the Trojans in the ascendant, with both Zeus (angered ...”

“... justifications of unauthorised biographers are no more than pious mouthings; who, really, wants to read an authorised biography? So take Jeremy Treglown’s apologia at the beginning of his Dahl biography with a pinch of salt. Ophelia Dahl plans to write the authorised version of her father’s life, with the approval of his second wife, Felicity, who asked ...”