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“... being in the right place, as in Arnold Bennett and J.B. Priestley, and it moves rather close to John Wain’s posthumous novel, in his Bildungsroman series about a young man growing up in Oxford – a trifle ironical in view of Amis’s strongly-expressed disdain for Wain’s mode and temper of writing. Both novels join in a mood of mellow ...”

“... a year as Literary Editor for the Nation, doing so well at matching books and reviewers that John Crowe Ransom said he deserved a Pulitzer Prize for it. ‘Not since Poe had an American poet laid down the law in quite such a carnival spirit.’ In those days of talented amateurs the Eng Lit business was still the Gay Science. Used by Nietzsche, and as a ...”

“... be. ‘Literary work’ in copyright law is thus a semantic convenience of the same order as ‘John Doe’: what it is all depends. The legal fiction that the literary work has an abstract, single existence which accompanies but mysteriously transcends any book fits in nicely with the academic theory of ‘text’. It is no accident that the century which ...”

“... tableau of a secular scene, the bourgeois mode of ‘a window on the world’ (which John Berger once associated with a safe on the wall), or a modernist painting of pure abstraction (which, despite the frequent claims of autonomy made on its behalf, is usually a commodity on the wall too). Like many others, Nagel sees a gradual breakdown of this ...”

“... prosecution case against Edgar A. Poe looks a strong one. Taken in by the Richmond tobacco broker John Allan when left orphaned at the age of two by the death of his actress mother Eliza, brought up as a member of the family and sent to the University of Virginia, he responded by running up gambling debts and drinking, so that he left after a ...”

“... powers, and her industry, as a writer. There is inevitably a good deal about her in Roy Foster’s biography of Yeats, but it is, in all its extensive splendour, a book about Yeats, and Gregory can be no more than a secondary character. Tóibín’s is a little book, but it does keep her at its centre, and its gentleness probably reflects the mood ...”

“... in 1892, and she outlived him by forty years. Lady Gregory made herself useful to Yeats, as Roy Foster shows in his biography of the poet, 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 ...”

“... political history this century, from Rufus Isaacs to Horatio Bottomley to Maundy Gregory to John Poulson, is littered with great corruption stories. The explanation for the increase in sleaze under Thatcher and Major is not to be found in any particular scandal, nor in the sudden susceptibility of certain individuals to corruption. Contemporary sleaze ...”

“... 19th century – a good boy doesn’t throw his footman out of the window. The book is in the John Johnson Collection of Ephemera at the Bodleian, and this scene was pictured, as I recall, taking place in a panelled room – a prefects’ study, perhaps, or a dining club. Boys’ play, then. And although circumstances and contexts change, still ...”

“... but the use made of those failures by the endlessly influential revolutionary propaganda of John Mitchel, which presented the disaster as a deliberate genocide, arousing answering echoes to this day in American school curriculums. America remains relevant. The construction of ‘advanced’ Irish nationalism at home relied on buttressing from ...”

“... The afterlife of Surrealism is more active in poetry, as in the New York School of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and others: ‘We all “grew up Surrealist”,’ Ashbery once remarked, ‘without even being aware of it.’ Surrealist directives – to suspend rational control as much as possible, to let language dictate, to hold to the first thought as the ...”

“... and the narrator run a blog called Frances Farmer Is My Sister; both are married to a man called John). The book is a composite creature: part memoir, part criticism, part fiction, part feminist tract or call to arms or self-help manual or biography or work of literary history. Perhaps the best clue to what she’s doing comes when the narrator considers ...”

“... bedroom and see some of his books: Wordsworth (whom he has already mentioned in the car), David Foster Wallace and Pauline Kael, both of whom feature later in the film. But interesting isn’t quite the word for Lucy’s finding in one of Jake’s books – Rotten Perfect Mouth (2015) by Eva H.D. – a poem we heard her recite to Jake as one of her ...”

“... New York Sun ran a sensational scoop: the ‘Great Astronomical Discoveries, Lately Made by Sir John Herschel, L.L.D., F.R.S., &c, at the Cape of Good Hope’. Herschel – former president of the Royal Astronomical Society and son of William Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus – had sailed from Britain to South Africa two years before with a giant ...”

“... 155 east-west streets drawn on open land in 1807. The grid was a piece of real estate speculation (John Jacob Astor made his fortune not by trading furs, as American folklore has it, but by buying up blocks as the city pushed north); nevertheless, Koolhaas calls it, with Corbusierian hyperbole, ‘the most courageous act of prediction in Western ...”