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“... The garden whose pleasures and plenty are described in A Paradise out of a Common Field is neither typical nor representative. Its owner is extremely rich, and its location a Victorian form of Arcadia: a place where money is no object, where all the world is the topmost Society, and where the servant class knows its place. Perhaps because this flawless corner of Victoria’s England is so very unlike what we know of it from Dickens and Mayhew, George Eliot and Mrs Gaskell, it seems rather an unreal landscape ...”

“... in 1911. The song was adopted by the Resistance during World War Two, because Domrémy, Joan of Arc’s birthplace, stood in the part of Lorraine that had not been ceded to Prussia after the French defeat in 1871, and from that time until the end of the First World War, the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine was the touchstone of French national ...”

“... social spiral, suggest that it is class which makes us. Edwardian Childhoods begins with Tommy Morgan’s account of his upbringing in East Lane – ‘Hard Street they called it’ – with two brothers, five sisters and parents who were ‘known as the two biggest drunkards in Waterloo and Blackfriars’. It was a childhood spent in cramped rooms and ...”

“... deep reasons for admiring The Fountain. I quickly suppressed my almost Pavlovian sneer at Charles Morgan, and realised that what she found in the book is the thing that matters. (Not that this alters my opinion about Charles Morgan, but it made me dubious about the whole business of literary criticism. I remember my own ...”

“... to a city, shifting from mind-reading to psychoanalysis. At the beginning we see a psychic, Zeena (Joan Blondell in the original movie; Toni Collette now), asking her audience to write questions on little cards, which she burns, making a joke about alcohol being the true spirit of foresight. Except that she doesn’t burn them. She burns other bits of paper ...”

“... seems clear enough. Well, not quite, for Pimlott is quoting one Wilson source on the matter, while Morgan, citing Harold on a different occasion, tells us that this all happened on 18 July, not 4 July, and that the idea that the romance would have been over had Gladys believed the stuff about becoming prime minister, was really just a family joke and not ...”

“... at close quarters, and Maynard would be lost to them. ‘How we all used to underrate her,’ said Morgan Forster. Their correspondence between 1918 and 1925, when they married, has been edited by a niece and a nephew, Polly Hill and Richard Keynes, who rightly believe that it will be ‘of value and interest and will not offend their ghosts’. In an ...”

“... jamboree was in nearby Miami’s South Beach that year). Will Self and his American publisher, Morgan Entrekin, arrived as I was leaving. The vast expanse of water and the huge hotel behind it made Self momentarily speechless. ‘Belly of an architect,’ he said, using the title of the Peter Greenaway movie to express his amazement. ‘A pool is ...”

“... and Have Not, which had been poorly reviewed on publication in 1937. Its central figure, Harry Morgan, is a brave failure who loses an arm and gets screwed by the rich. No, that’s not the movie, but Warners persuaded Hawks that it could be another Casablanca, with a café, vague conflict with the fascists, a resourceful lone operator, and some kind of ...”

“... forgets himself long enough to remember someone else distinct from himself – in this case, Joan Burroughs: it is a decent, humane poem, continuous with the best, the most exactly cadenced, work of Creeley, Snyder and O’Hara. In other poems, such as ‘My Alba’, there is an uncertain Blues tenderness to mitigate Ginsberg’s otherwise appalling ...”

“... a house of correction. Mrs Manley turns up in an ingenious ‘autobiography’ ghosted by Fidelis Morgan. She uses episodes from the published writings ‘which are widely acknowledged to be autobiographical’, and fills out the existing record on Manley in a number of places. We are told that her very name should be not Delarivière but Delarivier ...”

“... Younger Poets prize, Auden was frequently unenthused; in 1947, he awarded it to his former student Joan Murray, who had died five years earlier. Submissions in 1955 were so dismal that he privately asked John Ashbery and O’Hara for manuscripts (Ashbery’s Some Trees was the winner).Rich and her fans have bristled at some of the condescending praise her ...”

“... afterwards that ‘the only poem he [Eliot] showed any enthusiasm for was a dog poem called Morgan.’ He tried to retain – or regain – the sanctification poetry offered:John’s a slattern from the middle-classes,in his old wrapper,half-man, half-woman.His feet bare, caked with dirtbut still some elegance remains, from another century.In 1965 ...”

“... Several​ of the last century’s finest non-fiction writers – Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, James Baldwin – longed to be novelists. In interviews with the Paris Review, each touched on the tension and insecurity involved in their dual métier. Sontag wrote in surprisingly aspirational tones of ‘the novelist [I’d] finally given myself permission to be ...”

“... altogether: the Hawthornden of William Drummond; the Dublin of James Shirley; the Wales of Morgan Llwyd, Henry Vaughan and Katherine Philips; the Munster of Roger Boyle; the Edinburgh of Sir George Mackenzie and William Cleland; the Derry of William Philips. Its historical scope is just as broad. After a final chapter on Daniel Defoe’s activities in ...”