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“... its mark on Europe and America. An ancient city, a capital, with authors of all kinds, from Gavin Douglas to James Boswell to Annie S. Swan, Sir Compton Mackenzie and a thousand others: the subject is God’s own gift to the sifter of anecdotes and the historian of large-scale cultural change. Trevor Royle tackles it with affection and enthusiasm. Admirable ...”

“... of internal peace. Peel paved the way for the ‘One Nation’ Conservative Party. On the day on which he was buried the mills in the great cities stopped work, the shops closed and the flags of the merchant fleet in our harbours flew at half-mast. It is always a temptation to stretch the neat celebration of an anniversary beyond reasonable ...”

“... to me as ‘a great author who happened to have written only one great book’, in the words of Douglas Day, his first biographer. Faced with a three-book deal and the prospect of becoming his own assembly line, all he could think of was Under Under the Volcano. Robert Lowell writes: I memorised tricks to set the river on fire, somehow never wrote ...”

“... page 98 And 99, in the story called ‘Bliss’, Since the summer of ’62, its date, Its last day in a trap of pages. Prose Fly, what can ‘Je ne parle pas français’ mean To you who died in Scotland, when I closed These two sweet pages you were crushed between? Here is a green bus-ticket for one week In May, my place-mark in ‘The Dill Pickle’. I ...”

“... with his family in Egypt. Her first husband leaves her and she leaves her second husband. On the day of her sister’s wedding, she decides to take a shower and locks the bathroom door for an hour or more, forcing full-bladdered wedding guests to leave the reception early. Driving to California with her daughter, she settles their various quarrels by ...”

“... summit. Nearly caused war with Sudan; young Egyptian forearms writing out enlistment papers; one day there’s a youth’s flayed arms but no youth, green body tattering down in bomb ...”

“... has the soul a pure core and a penumbra of ideas through which alone the shadowy events of every day come nearer the disc’s intense white centre? We go in, to watch Star Trek’s portentous races against time: a scientist looks at his daughter’s soil samples – their planet is dying; oh yes, their love is pure, as pure as I’d wish the daughter-love to ...”

“... and Green Man green and Green Party green, well, vote for it, vote for the green, and white of day confusing now the blue ...”

“... community had settled on ‘multiple sclerosis’.Towards the end of a long walk on a summer’s day in 2017, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst noticed that his legs felt heavy and poorly co-ordinated. ‘By the time I reached my front door I was shuffling along like an old man in carpet slippers.’ He was in his late forties and ...”

“... Keith Douglas was 24 when he was killed in action, in 1944, and although quite a few of his poems had by then appeared in anthologies and magazines, he was not generally thought of as a significant ‘war poet’. But then, who was? ‘Where are the war poets?’ was a familiar journalistic cry from 1939 to 1945, and few answers were forthcoming ...”

“... first two months of 1895 were busy for Oscar Wilde. In late January he was in Algiers with Alfred Douglas. He wrote to Robert Ross: ‘There is a great deal of beauty here. The Kabyle boys are quite lovely. At first we had some difficulty procuring a proper civilised guide. But now it is all right and Bosie and I have taken to haschish: it is quite ...”

“... the declared puritan, it was perhaps easier to profess himself directly shocked by Freud. ‘Some day,’ he wrote in a magazine, ‘I will try to found a genuine psychology of fiction by writing down the history of my imagined life: duels, battles, love affairs with queens and all. The difficulty is that so much of it is too crudely erotic to be printable by ...”

“... whore’. Robbie Ross, guardian of Wilde’s memory, was a favourite target. At a party in 1912, Douglas (now 42 years of age) made a noisy entrance, strode across the room and declared ‘you are nothing but a bugger and a blackmailer.’ Ross ran into another room. Bosie pursued him, still shouting, and lunged at him. Luckily, a table intervened and Ross ...”

“... Decent people, Teresa Carpenter would assert, aren’t always what they seem. In 1982 William Douglas was working as a cell biologist at Tufts University near Boston, Massachusetts. He was an associate professor on the tenure track, a gifted scientist, and a successful grant-getter. He was married and he lived a quiet suburban life just outside the city with his wife and three children ...”

“... The landscape of Ellen Douglas’s Mississippi is designed to keep us out, to resist recognition; and the lines of its knobs and bluffs and ridges may be deciphered only by those who have been born and bred amongst them. For the rest of us they are edged but also obscured by lovingly named plants, by smilax, trillium, scuppernog vines and plum thickets ...”