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“... mock immodesty, ‘my bardship’. By this time bards were everywhere – in England too. Thomas Gray, a Cambridge don, wrote ‘The Bard’; William Collins, in London, hankered after the ‘Old Runic bards’ of the Highlands. More influentially, though, Edinburgh’s James Macpherson, after the smash-up of Culloden, produced his Fragments of Ancient ...”

“... Studio and Piero della Francesca’s stately explorations of perspective’. Similarly, faced with Andrew Wyeth’s frequently nude sequence of Helga Testorf, Updike resists his inclination to the obvious. He notes Wyeth’s ‘glamorising touch’ and his bogus claims to be an abstractionist, then he caves in. But before he is prepared to admit that he ...”

“... The legend, essentially, is the one in Beatty’s fevered mind of a Faustian compact, a Dorian Gray-like perversion of human destiny. But Lillie was just trying to make the best of things under the circumstances: a perfectly human way to proceed, I should have thought. As for her soul – who’s to say? Lillie had the good fortune not just to be born ...”

“... most fervent champions, W.D. O’Connor, author of the first extended defence of Whitman, The Good Gray Poet (1866). And when Horace Traubel inquired, in 1888, about Whitman’s views on racial integration, he was dismayed to receive the following answer: ‘The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated: it is the law of history, races, what-not: always so ...”

“... the group’s best tunes, only to be pushed out for being a Beatles-loving middle-class namby.) Andrew Loog Oldham, who managed the Rolling Stones, was the crucial precursor in grasping that bad publicity was useful – something to be actively sought, even fabricated. But he hadn’t featured so prominently in the coverage of his clients as McLaren ...”

“... House had been dictated by Roth’s Connecticut neighbour and flouncy nemesis Francine du Plessix Gray – ‘Francine Duplicitous Gray’, as Roth called her. Interviewing may not have been Miller’s forte but what was his forte? He made such a skimpy mess of the Notes on the Text for Volume Three of Roth’s Library of ...”

“... the eyes tired as he joked with his retinue. The beard had grown scruffy, heavily threaded with gray. ‘Visitors from abroad (and chiefly from the United States) ... Castro sees in astounding numbers and at astounding length,’ There is something of the assiduousness of the journalist about Castro, while his appetite for general conversation at late ...”

“... of course, not hers. Eva died in 1977 aged 91, after which the poems more or less stopped coming. Andrew Motion thinks this is no coincidence.Larkin pinpointed 63 as his probable departure date because that was when his father went, turned by his mother into ‘the sort of closed, reserved man who would die of some thing internal’. Sydney Larkin was the ...”

“... The Gregory clause was ‘a charter for land clearance and consolidation’, according to Peter Gray. ‘The substantial rise in evictions after 1847 was attributed largely to its introduction,’ according to Christine Kinealy. For the tenants whose potato crop had failed and whose families were starving, the Gregory clause was a nightmare. As a rule, not ...”

“... blighted her life and eventually transformed her – not entirely figuratively – into a Dorian Gray-style lesbian fright-bag. Heartbreakingly attractive in her youth (see the exquisite nude portraits made by her gay photographer friend Rolf Tietgens in the early 1940s), she looked like a sullen gargoyle by the time she died: rubbery, bloodshot, wrinkled to ...”

“... not a chosen intimate. Aesthetic imagination was not a bond between them. Severn had what Andrew Motion has described as ‘a horrible tendency to sound both snobbish and fawning when talking about his posh connections’. For him, art was a means of social advancement and truth a thing to improve on. His artistic distinction was bogus. The merit of ...”

“... was echoed by the Superior Court judge John Fauntleroy, one of DC’s first black justices, and by Andrew Fowler, an influential black pastor. That Clarke was white made the policy of decriminalisation particularly susceptible to attack. Some, like Moore, suspected a plot to weaken blacks (he would later oppose gun control for the same reason); others accused ...”

“... had graced the state flag since 1879 with the ‘stars and bars’: the blue and white cross of St Andrew on an in-your-face field of bright red. Its Civil War service done, this banner had rallied the Ku Klux Klan as it helped re-establish white power in the South during a half-century reign of terror. When, in 1993, the then Georgia Governor asked the ...”