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“... Writers in the early part of our century fell in love with the interminable work, the book that seemed infinite. The Cantos, Remembrance of Things Past, The Man without Qualities were all tasks designed to last the writer’s lifetime, and they did. But there are degrees and differences among these projects. The Cantos were a ragbag, as Pound once half-mockingly called them, into which he could throw the contents of his mind in the form of poetry, but they were a ragbag that dreamed of a secret ordering ...”

“... if Carol let them play on into extra time. Or so I hazard after reading the confessions of Cynthia Payne, the ‘madam’ jailed in 1978 for running ‘a disorderly house’ in Streatham. The police raided her place during a Christmas party and picked up 17 women and 53 ‘middle-aged to elderly’ men, including clergymen, MPs, barristers and diplomats. Only ...”

“... so small it couldn’t be measured. Same with dance music in the heyday of the dance bands: Jack Payne, Henry Hall and Ambrose were all tuneful and popular; the more rarified Fred Elizalde at the Savoy was so disliked that he had to be dropped from the rota. And for the first time, as far as I know, a history of pre-war radio pays serious attention to the ...”

“... of others, and had justified doubts about some of the work of one senior scholar, John Payne Collier. Halliwell was still only 20 when, in 1840, he joined three distinguished figures – Alexander Dyce, Charles Knight and Collier – in founding the Shakespeare Society. Collier was then around fifty, with another forty-odd years to live. He was ...”

“... masters, cutting out the ship’s stewards, a Cunard carry-on I did not know about until I read Philip Dawson’s The Liner. Perhaps such things also happened aboard the ‘ocean greyhounds’ of the Axis. Hitler’s dashing duo were the Bremen, which had a catapult-operated light aircraft, and the Europa; Mussolini’s matched pair were the Rex and the ...”

“... told Farrell that his action had ‘changed my life – for the better’. She fell in with Philip Rahv, Dwight Macdonald and other young intellectuals disillusioned with Stalinism, and they founded Partisan Review, with the intention of making it an independent, left-minded commentator on literature and politics. The personal consequences of all this ...”

“... metaphor might be the long, reasonably happy and apparently sexless marriage with Charlotte Payne-Townshend, who belonged to that class from which Shaw felt excluded by the alcoholism and improvidence of his immediate forebears: the Protestant Irish gentry. For all his frequent and often passionate flirtations with women – mainly actresses, but a few ...”

“... him in America; Hardwick waited for the episode to pass. Lowell was conducting the affair from the Payne Whitney Clinic, to which he had been committed after his third breakdown. ‘The whole business was sincere enough,’ he told a friend after his release from hospital and return to Hardwick, ‘but a stupid pathological mirage, a magical orange grove in a ...”

“... a steady income for himself and his heirs. He was never above suing: in 1604 he took his neighbour Philip Rogers to court for a debt of 35 shillings and ten pence. When a group of local notables sought late in his life to enclose common land near Stratford, he prudently did not interfere, once he had satisfied himself that his income from tithes was safe. The ...”

“... that their ‘astral bodies’ were probably specks of dust on the plates (a version, perhaps, of Philip Pullman’s ‘dark materials’). He got himself injected with mescaline to enhance his senses. Fodor and Evans also examined the ‘psychic telegraph’, the ‘Communigraph’ and ‘Reflectograph’, inventions marketed by the medium Louisa Bolt and ...”

“... to steal it. If, as I think, the only textual support for ‘bewildering’ was supplied by John Payne Collier, the Victorian scholar and forger, we can even say that Eliot chose a reading he knew to be fraudulent just because he liked it better. (You need authority to do that, and Eliot had some to spare: compare the acceptance into English dictionaries of ...”