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“... literary correspondents and holiday hosts: Stein and Toklas, Gide and Wilder, Carl van Vechten, Thomas Mann and Paul Cadmus. For Steward, a life in letters compensated (partly) for the one restrained by law and social convention. And by syphilis, picked up from a railway porter and necessitating a period of celibacy. The cure involved weekly injections of ...”

“... a prefix that Schwitters added to his poems, pictures, assemblages and constructions, a ‘special brand’. ‘Pure Merz is art, pure Dadaism is non-art, and both are intentionally so,’ Schwitters announced in Merz 1. ‘Whereas Dadaism merely asserts oppositions, Merz balances out oppositions by evaluating them within the artwork.’ Note that he positions ...”

“... Reading the English translations of the Psalms – reading Tyndale, Coverdale, Milton, Sidney, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Francis Bacon, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw and the inspired committee-work of the Authorised Version – one immediately notices that the biblical texts are really quite vile, and that the poets’ ‘personal agendas’ seem almost without ...”

“... to the ranks of mid-century modernist loners – David Jones, Basil Bunting, W.S. Graham and R.S. Thomas – Finlay’s continued evasion of a biographer acquires honourable precedents. Jones has yet to be biographised (though long-time devotee Tom Dilworth is on the trail), Graham likewise; Justin Wintle’s Furious Interiors, a first stab at R.S. ...”

“... her son Richard I while he was on the Third Crusade. At a humbler rank, the Cistercian monk Thomas of Froidmont wrote a Life of his heroic sister, Margaret of Beverley. Having gone on pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1187 while Saladin was besieging the city, Margaret assisted in its defence ‘like a fierce virago’, wearing a cauldron as a helmet as she ...”

“... It was written sometime between 1939 and 1941 – Capote was born in 1924 – to his schoolmate Thomas Flanagan. Flanagan kept it all his life. It read: ‘I do hereby solemnly affirm that any statements I may have made about Thomas Flanagan, or said that he had made, were calumnies and lies on my part. Truman ...”

“... once seen shuffling down the Lane with a carrier-bag containing six ‘author’s copies’ of his brand-new ‘breakthrough’ novel. When quizzed, he said he wanted to celebrate publication day ‘in style’. Each of these yarns, it seems to me, could be gruesomely fleshed out by the author of my new New Grub Street. And if he cares to get in touch, I can ...”

“... On 20 July 1943 the Polish artist Jonasz Stern was executed along with hundreds of other Jews of the Lwow ghetto by SS machine-gun fire. He awoke from a faint to find himself alive, buried under the corpses of the entire neighbourhood, covered in other people’s blood and excrement, the only survivor on Janowski Street. Two of the books reviewed here are about survivors, people who turned right instead of left, ran instead of lingering or lingered instead of running, those who met kindly Polish peasants or had ‘good faces’ – did not look Jewish, that is to say – individuals who survived, crazily, randomly, inexplicably, when everybody else, not just their families but neighbours, associates at work, team-mates, local shopkeepers, their whole world, was murdered ...”

“... one narrator puts it: ‘How would a text about our lives have to sound?’One model for Goetz’s brand of acoustically informed anti-literature (he also spends some time laying into ‘the mad stupid babble’ around electronic music and rave culture produced by journalists and academics) is clearly Thomas Bernhard, whose ...”

“... in past times belong to what Peter Laslett calls, hauntingly, the world we have lost. The Diary of Thomas Turner claims notice as a sustained insider’s account of how ordinary people lived from day to day in a pre-industrial English village. On Thursday 27 December 1756 two of Turner’s neighbours, Thomas Fuller and ...”

“... reserved for Sir Anthony Nutting. In his introduction to the new edition of The Suez Affair, Hugh Thomas describes Sir Anthony as ‘the one man who conducted himself consistently and with impeccable honour’ at the time of Suez, and it is a judgment difficult to dispute. A young and talented minister of state, Anthony Nutting sacrificed his political career ...”

“... leading management books of the Eighties have been American, and ‘excellence’ is their creed. Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman Junior’s In Search of Excellence1 appeared in 1982 and it quickly established itself as the best-selling management book ever. Here was an unambiguous riposte to the Japanese economic miracle, that Pearl Harbour of the Carter ...”

“... five early adopters of synth/beat-box tech I personally called to mind weren’t so pale: Timmy Thomas, Shuggie Otis, Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder, Lee Perry.)But Schütte isn’t finished yet. Kraftwerk’s influence, it seems, also determined every molecule of 1980s electro-pop. They ‘set the blueprint for all later bands and musicians working in the area ...”

“... in New York to the one in Bilbao, he is often called a genius without a blush of embarrassment (Thomas Krens, Guggenheim director and Gehry ‘collaborator’, can’t get enough of the word). Why all the hoopla? Is this designer of metallic museums and curvy concert halls, luxury houses and flashy corporate headquarters, truly Our Greatest Living ...”

“... who was a queen herself for a spell: Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth’s mother. In an age when Thomas More showed his radical mettle by according his daughters the same education as his sons, Anne had been allowed to cultivate her mind to an unusual degree; she had also corresponded with Marguerite, with whom she shared an interest in Reform theology and ...”