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“... at his country’s methods was so great that he broke off relations with former friends (like Thomas Mann) and even his current lover, who championed the sinking. Others were moved to fisticuffs. The social-critical novelist Leonhard Frank overheard a socialist journalist proclaim in a posh Berlin café that the ...”

“... newly-formed Australia Council. Behind established international figures such as Patrick White, Thomas Keneally and now Peter Carey crowds a small army – a second wave, as it were – of grant-garlanded and prize-bedecked novelists and storytellers, many of whom, especially those whose reputations derive initially from short fiction, have benefited from ...”

“... image that includes deeper, older layers. The researchers – Lieven Verdonck, Alessandro Launaro, Frank Vermeulen and Martin Millett – began their GPR survey in 2015, and published preliminary results in the journal Antiquity last month: ‘an overview of the full plan, alongside a more detailed case study of one sample area’, as well as a thorough ...”

“... corrupt professors at UCLA, owns a cell line derived from tissues taken from an ex-marine called Frank Burnet. Burnet’s cells are potentially valuable because they’re abnormally good at producing cytokines, proteins with anti-carcinogenic properties. Burnet is trying to sue UCLA for removing his tissues under false pretences and exploiting them for ...”

“... Mencken, Salinger, Thurber, Edmund Wilson, Nabokov) and for those who, having joined, resigned (Thomas Hart Benton, Lewis Mumford, John O’Hara, Yvor Winters, Ezra Pound). Nor was it famous for anything it actually did: for years its main business was merely to perpetuate itself by suitable elections. Of late, however, it has taken to sponsoring lectures ...”

“... and the Bacchae, long neglected, turned out to be of particular interest in the 20th century (to Thomas Mann, Hans Werner Henze and Wole Soyinka, along with a good many others cited here). The Bacchae, in effect, came to replace the Iphigenia tragedies because of a new emphasis on the chaotic, orgiastic violence of the period. Hughes is at his most powerful ...”

“... at the Corinthian Club, a gay gym on Great Russell Street (‘the masterpiece of the architect Frank Orme, whom I once met at my grandfather’s’), and picks up men everywhere. In a public lavatory in Hyde Park, he picks up, in a quite different sense, an elderly man who has collapsed at the urinal. This is Charles, Lord Nantwich, who also swims at the ...”

“... of the church clerks whom they seemed to disdain. Professor Barlow’s sterling new biography of Thomas Becket shows us a man whose origins, like William’s, were not of the highest: his father ‘may have been in textiles’. Like William, Thomas owed his rise, not to inheritance, but to his being sent to the household ...”

“... Thomas and Katia Mann had six children. It was clear from early on that Katia most loved the second child, Klaus, who was born in 1906, and that Thomas loved Erika, the eldest, born in 1905, and also Elisabeth, born in 1918. The other three – the barely tolerated ones – were Golo, born in 1909, Monika, born in 1910, and Michael, born in 1919 ...”

“... from the story ‘Natural Colour’ (1998). ‘Driving back from taking the babysitter home, Frank would pass darkened houses where husbands he knew were lying in bed, head to murmuring head, with wives he coveted.’ Wood comments: ‘One relishes the kitschy way that adjective “murmuring” strives to raise the sentence’s tone, plump its cushion a ...”

“... gloves, and he looks as if he could take on an army on his own. Sargent’s portrait of Sir Frank Swettenham, High Commissioner of the Malay Straits and Singapore, is a study in hauteur – the arrogance maximised by his white military tunic and the twirled and waxed moustache of a Parisian dandy of the Belle Epoque. That picture has quite a kick ...”

“... parents having intercourse doggie fashion, and to which Freud traced his manifold symptoms, D.M. Thomas concluded: ‘though it may well not have been true it is beautiful: which means it has a different, deeper, kind of truth.’ The problems of collusion and self-deception set by phenomena like these suggest that it is not novel sociological perspectives ...”

“... Seventeen years have passed since the publication of Pynchon’s immense Gravity’s Rainbow, during which time exegesis has continued more or less unabated. It is accompanied by tireless speculation as to what the author could be up to next, where he was, indeed who he was. Compared with Pynchon, J.D. Salinger is a publicity-hunter. One daring scholarly conjecture, that these authors are one and the same person, is a paranoid fantasy that might well have been induced by prolonged exposure to Pynchon’s oeuvre ...”

“... may die, but sheer professional interest mercifully remains. I thought of Bagshaw when reading Frank Kermode’s lively little book History and Value, and I thought of him again while enjoying Richard Cobb’s Something to hold onto, whose title would itself have been greeted with fellow-feeling by Bagshaw. Anthony Powell’s character is fascinated by ...”

“... The member yielded not seed but, at the Circumcision, blood. The Circumcision was described by St Thomas Aquinas as ‘a remedy for original sin, which is transmitted through the act of generation’. God further condescended when consenting to enact this sacramental admission of guilt, though of course free of it himself. Steinberg again and again ...”