Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch dismissed Hopkins as.

Revolting, the London Times called Millais’ Christ in the House of His Parents.

The occasion, soon after Vladimir Horowitz became Toscanini’s son-in-law, on which Toscanini leaned from the podium and patted him on the head at the end of a performance.

Green eyes, the self-portraits indicate van Gogh had.

It has been possible for a long time to conceive of a poet who has never written a poem.

Leslie Fiedler once said.

Debussy never learned which side won World War I.

Old enough to have started coming upon likenesses on postage stamps of other writers he had known personally or had at least met in passing.

Anthony Trollope was once told by an acquaintance that one of his recurring serialized characters had become boring.

Trollope killed her off in the next installment.

The misfortunate, otherwise unknown first-century BC Roman Egnatius — remembered because of a poem in which Catullus accuses him of cleaning his teeth with urine.

The only excuse for the suffering that God allows in the world — is that he does not exist.

Stendhal said.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s addiction to morphine.

And/or ether.

Is there one major Dostoievsky novel in which no one commits suicide?

Dostoievsky gave me more than any thinker, more even than Gauss.

Einstein said.

Former Naval Person —

Winston Churchill’s code name having been in World War II.

Colonel Berger —

Malraux’s, in the Resistance.

Kipling, who was forty-two, remains the youngest author to win the Nobel Prize.

Camus was forty-four.

July 17, 1967, John Coltrane died on.

Aspen, Colorado, Mina Loy died in.

Thomas Hardy’s first wife, Emma, kept a twenty-year diary that was evidently devoted almost entirely to the evisceration of his character.

Hardy burned every word of it at her death.

A second wife, Florence, once accused him of not having spoken to anyone outside of their house in twelve days. Hardy insisted he had.

He had said good morning to the manure-cart driver.

O body, mass of corruptions, what have I to do with thee?

Asked Augustine.

The proper study of mankind is books.

Said Aldous Huxley.

Benoit Mandelbrot.

Benoit de Sainte-Maure.

Émile Zola’s certainty that after a hundred years Les Fleurs du Mal would be no more than a footnoted curiosity in literary history.

Maugham’s — that there was nothing to be found in Mallarmé but pretense and platitudes.

The identity of the Immortal Beloved.

Keep hold of my arm, they must make room for us, not we for them.

Shortly after its publication, Robert McAlmon informed Joyce that he planned to throw his copy of Ulysses out the window. Joyce told him not to:

Socrates might be passing in the street.

E. M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot.

Said Katherine Mansfield.

The early Shakespearean Betterton, distressed over foreign intrusions onto the late seventeenth-century London stage:

By squeaking Italians and capering monsieurs, end quote.

Shakespeare’s birthday, Turner was born on.

More greatness in this man than in any other born in our times.

Vasari saw in Donatello.

What needs to be said is best said twice.

Said Empedocles.

At one point near the end of the Reign of Terror, more than 1,300 guillotined prisoners were flung into the same single Paris mass grave — one of the 1,300 having been André Chénier.

Continued speculation that Abraham Lincoln was homosexual.

Bologna, Lodovico Carracci died in.

Parma, Agostino.

Rome, Annibale.

Theodore Dreiser’s general preference for the word kike, rather than Jew.

If it were up to me, I would have wiped my behind with his last decree.

Said Mozart — after a demand by the Archbishop of Salzburg for more brevity in his church compositions.

Fish feel pain.

A seminonfictional semifiction.

And with its interspersed unattributed quotations at roughest count adding up to a hundred or more.

Good lord, Willie, you are drunk. Either that or you’re writing for a very small audience.

Is Sir Walter Raleigh and his cloak the oldest tale from English history that children still remember?

Or King Alfred and the cakes?

’Tis such a task as scarce leaves a man time to be a good neighbour, an useful friend, nay, to plant a tree, much less to save his soul.

Said Pope, re writing well.

Michelangelo’s Pietà —

Is the Virgin many years too young?

Dante will always remain popular because nobody ever reads him.

Said Voltaire.

Approximately seventy-five years before Blake learned Italian to do so — at sixty.

The cocktail party at Peggy Guggenheim’s Manhattan townhouse during which Jackson Pollock casually urinated into the fireplace.

At more than nine thousand published pages, does Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics have any competition as the longest unfinished book of the twentieth century?

Is I Samuel 18:20, where it is stated that King Saul’s daughter Michal loves David, the only place in the Old Testament where a woman is reported to actually love a man?

Even if by II Samuel 6:16 we find her learning to despise him?

The paintings of a drunken privy cleaner.

A Cézanne critic spoke of.

The two younger brothers of William and Henry James — both of whom were wounded while fighting for the Union during the Civil War.

I have never been surprised to find men wicked, but I have often been surprised to find them not ashamed.

Said Swift.

Even though they had dedicated poems to each other, because of the conditions of life in Russia Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetayeva managed to meet only once — little more than a year before Tsvetayeva would hang herself.

Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.

Stalin once actually ventured.

No girl was ever seduced by a book.

Postulated Jimmy Walker.

Briseis, in the Iliad, who is not identified at all except as the captive maiden taken by Agamemnon from Achilles.

But who over the centuries is transformed into the Cressida of Chaucer and Shakespeare.

And whose name is in fact not a name — but means only the woman from Brisa, a town in Lesbos.

If the Republicans would stop telling lies about the Democrats, we would stop telling the truth about them.

Adlai Stevenson said.

It Ain’t Necessarily So. In Danish.

Which was piped into Danish radio by the underground whenever announcements were made of German victories in World War II.

Baldur von Schirach, one of the chief Nazi war criminals tried at Nuremberg, on the origin of his anti-Semitism:

From a book about the Jews by Henry Ford.

The woman sleeping on the sofa dreams that she is transported into the forest, hearing the music of the snake charmer’s instrument. This explains why the sofa is in the picture.

Unquote — Le Douanier.

Looking is not as simple as it looks.

Said Ad Reinhardt.

Eighty sopranos. Eighty contraltos. Seventy basses. Sixty tenors.

— Called for in Belioz’ Grande Messe des Mortes.

Over the hill to the poorhouse I’m trudgin’ my weary way.

He is the handsomest man in England, and he wears the most beautiful shirts.

Said Yeats of Rupert Brooke.

If on a winter’s night with no other source of warmth, Novelist were to burn an Andy Warhol, qualms?

Qualmless.

Jane Ellen Harrison was proficient in fourteen languages.

Utrillo, on the occasion of one of his several arrests for drunkenness — trying to commit suicide by smashing his head against the walls of his Montmartre jail cell.