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“... by Rousseau, that the commander of the British forces was gay. Although Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown diplomatically avoid so vivid a phrase as ‘prudery and cowardice’, their charges against the conservatism of the Augustan establishment are scarcely less severe. For them the taboo areas are not sexual but ideological. ‘Theory’ is the ...”

“... Where Now​ is Laura Kasischke’s tenth book of verse (Copper Canyon, £23). She has also written young adult novels, science fiction, historical fiction, books you might label as mysteries or thrillers, and realist novels about present-day adults – 22 books in all over 25 years. Usually, when I read a big Selected, I find myself thinking about how the poet has changed, how far she has come, or else about her limits and when she began to spin her wheels ...”

“... least successful moments, walks straight into two of the tales. Above all, he is not just read, as Laura Brown read Woolf in The Hours, making but not quite making Woolf’s tragic story her own. Or named, as Clarissa is named for Mrs Dalloway, making her party for the Aids-stricken Richard a reprise. In fact, in Specimen Days, Whitman is not read at ...”

“... favourite television programme and also, by some accounts, Saddam Hussein’s. It was based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s eight novels, which have now entered the Library of America as The Little House Books: the first Tea Party favourites to join its ranks. Rose Wilder Lane, who wrote the books with her mother, intended them to be a defence of ‘the ...”

“... of Dante’s Inferno, a book on North American butterflies, and his own novel The Original of Laura. Wait a minute. If he was reading it, why can’t we, why are we stranded with a small handful of fragments, however luminous (some of them)? Well, he was reading it as he wrote it, the thing was ‘completed in [his] mind’, and like many writers he was ...”

“... childhood during which his primary obsessions were cartooning, pulp fiction and the movies. At Brown University he became editor of the humorous magazine, the Brown Jug, and met Nathan Weinstein, who later changed his name to Nathanael West; Sid himself had originally been named Simeon. That Weinstein or West ended up a ...”

“... Chamber again. ‘Why in the devil’s name doesn’t Paul speak?’ Engels wrote in perplexity to Laura Lafargue, as one government scandal succeeded another. Nobody outside France could make out why he was allowing this ‘splendid opportunity’ to slip through his fingers. ‘My dear Lafargue, buck up,’ Engels begged from London, during the early days of ...”

“... father had so carefully cut and laid on the floor of her Morris Minor, swirls of gick green on a brown smear with yellow specks. Box-room, my eye. She crawled over that carpet from the living-room into the hall when she was two and loved every dizzy bit of it. Now she has to drive around in it, give people lifts and lie, her clutch pedal pressed into the ...”

“... Might Happen, her best novel, a young mother is stabbed to death in a Suffolk seaside town. Laura Blundy (2000) – which is historical rather than domestic gothic and so more eventful – opens with Laura battering her red-headed husband to death. Laura’s baby survives, but she ...”

“... xenophobia or Enderby’s? You can’t read something like the account of dinner with Mrs Laura Schoenbaum – the theatre patroness who shares the name of Shakespeare’s best biographer – without feeling that it’s the author who’s grinding axes. When, to take one instance, an idiotic lawyer rounds on the innocent Enderby, over the cake and ...”

“... felt strongly that it didn’t and shouldn’t. In order to cope with the demands of his mailbox, Laura Kuhn tells us, he adopted the Note-O-Gram – a new piece of technology that anticipated the functionality of email while retaining the aura of a letter. Cage would write in his blocky handwriting on a top sheet, over colour-coded reply sheets and carbon ...”

“... concoct quizzes ovet tea: Do you prefer Diekens on Thackeray Tennyson or Browning? White meat or brown? Men or women? They are treated with distant kindness. She forms a more intense association with a brother and sister, visitors from London, who are full of the fin de siècle spirit: together, they cultivate their melancholy, quote Swinburne and pity the ...”

“... de Real; a large number of sensationally beautiful women, Magalena and Irenita and Livia and Laura and Mirtila and especially the super-luscious Cuba Venegas, strut their stuff; it seems remarkably easy to fondle their breasts but almost impossible to get beyond that stage. Cuba Venegas was born Gloria Perez before making it as a model and inspiring a ...”

“... that may be). In 1952 he went all the way to Goa to venerate the body of St Francis Xavier. ‘One brown stump of toe emerging from white wrapping,’ he noted approvingly. ‘Body fully vested, one grey forearm and hand, and grey clay-like skull visible.’ This seems only a step away from the pet cemetery in Forest Lawn, and Waugh’s gleeful interviews with ...”

“... two large, electronically sophisticated wholesalers, Ingram Book Company and Baker & Taylor. As Laura Miller notes, these wholesalers’ speed and reliability of delivery ‘rationalised book distribution by enabling booksellers to implement a “just in time” strategy’.* The cultural tone of the mall book-chains, and the wholesalers behind them, was ...”