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“... a hyper-uranian aspect to become an eternal pasture folded in all thought so that there is a hall therein that is a made place, created by light wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall. As a mature poet, Duncan was accused by his friend Charles Olson – along with just about everyone else who read his work – of wanton myth-mongering, a charge ...”

“... Gawthorpe sat down with members of the London leadership to listen to Cecil Sharp’s folk songs. Edith Key, president of the Huddersfield branch of the WSPU, was also reborn. The illegitimate child of a domestic servant, she was working as a knotter, preparing thread for the looms, when she joined the Huddersfield Choral Society. There she met her husband, a ...”

“... Catholic? And at what point do we draw the line between dress and costume, between life and art? Edith Sitwell was made to feel self-conscious about her appearance as a child. As an adult she made sure that everyone else would be conscious of it too; this was dress as the performance of personality. My thoughts about women and their clothes, how they wear ...”

“... anyone who can.’ Among others who leapt to the defence of culture as they knew it were Donald Hall, Herbert Gold, Delmore Schwartz, Truman Capote (on Kerouac: ‘that’s not writing, that’s type-writing’), Robert Brustein and James Dickey (‘Howl is the skin of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer thrown over the conventional maunderings of one type of ...”

“... without ever being great himself.’ On Howells’s successor in the genteel tradition: ‘Edith Wharton’s great subject should have been the biography of her own class, for her education and training had given her alone in her literary generation the best access to it. But the very significance of that education was her inability to transcend and ...”

“... out of the funding for her project. After three months they elope to New York and marry at City Hall. During her honeymoon at Hotel Woodstock, she writes: ‘I had never thought that such happiness could be for me.’ To complete the reversal of gender norms, when Harlow Shapley, Pickering’s successor as director, announces their elopement to the other ...”

“... up with brandy, thus intoxicating the judges and winning the prize. 12 June. The Royal Festival Hall reopens. About a month after its unveiling in 1951 a party from my school in Leeds went down by overnight bus to the Festival of Britain where in the morning we went to a brief concert at the Festival Hall, such events ...”

“... tinkling, private, giggling, impression. As if I had gone in to a men’s urinal.’ Edith Wharton, a frequent guest at Qu’Acre, wouldn’t have liked that either. To the translator Gerard Hopkins, who stayed at Qu’Acre as a young man, the most striking thing was the provision of books in the lavatories. In a preface to Belchamber written in ...”

“... to The Chase and, perhaps his masterpiece, Explosion in a Cathedral, extravagantly praised by Dame Edith Sitwell (Ah those Sitwell siblings, meddling in things Cuban!) and Graham Greene and Tyrone Power. (Power wanted to write, produce and star in successive film versions of Carpentier’s Kingdom and Lost Steps but he lost the crown to a coronary.) Something ...”

“... fights with bouncers and cabbies, drunken self-pity and bouts of remorse. Take his courtship of Edith Wharton, one of his literary heroes. At their first meeting, in 1920, he prostrated himself, kneeling ‘at her feet in a showy adulation’. Invited to lunch at Wharton’s French château, he ‘fortified his courage along the route with alcohol’ and ...”

“... he had to hand: Sara Fricker, the vivid and quick sister of his own intended, the much more docile Edith. A startled Sara was introduced to her new young man as he returned, bedraggled and sunburned, from the tour of Wales – ‘a dreadful figure’, as she remembered, though admittedly ‘eloquent and clever’. And so Coleridge abandoned Cambridge and ...”

“... female oppressor of her youth: Brontë’s description fairly seethes with murderous venom. Edith Wharton heroines, steely girls on the make such as Lily Bart or Undine Spragg, routinely anathematise the hypocritical society matrons who obstruct their passage to wealth and status: their aversion seems grounded in Wharton’s own polite loathing of her ...”

“... But even here money is hiding. There are toilets (temporarily closed for cleaning) in the entrance hall. This is a progressive facility. I chose a nice copy of The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton from the shelves of the free library. Next time I come, I’ll bring something in exchange. The FOODTOGO refreshment cave featured ...”

“... Lydig – her second husband was a wealthy New York businessman, Philip Lydig – was like one of Edith Wharton’s spoiled anti-heroines: sexy, insane, theatrical, improvident and entrancingly beautiful. She appears – a wanton in Worth gowns – in countless memoirs of Old New York. Men held her in near-cultic regard. Sargent and Boldini painted her; Rodin ...”

“... American literary scene in all its brash bravura and high stakes providing a Radio City Music Hall backdrop for even celebrity-averse writers such as Roth to achieve stardom. That Roth made it a lasting stardom is a testament to a relentless work ethic and a bottomless faith in the value and vocation of literature; he didn’t try to smooth down the ...”