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“... first publisher, Lawrence and Bullen. The sisters’ real achievement – and the one for which Joan Hardwick feels they ought to be remembered – came about much later, after they had moved back to Ireland, where they set up and ran a printing press, and workshop. They made and sold hand-printed books and embroidered goods, and made enough money to ...”

“... her grandson, Anthony Glyn, was published in 1955, revised in 1988. Why, then, another biography? Joan Hardwick, author of An Immodest Violet (1990), a study of Violet Hunt (whose novels included – yes – The Tiger Skin), evidently felt irresistibly drawn to another immodest adventuress of the period. She is a writer who can keep a straight face when ...”

“... in feminist criticism. Two victims of such discrimination are Violet Hunt and May Sinclair. As Joan Hardwick’s biography demonstrates astutely, Hunt led a far from conventional life, and was active in promoting new art and new writing. She was neither celibate nor lesbian (she brusquely rejected Radclyffe Hall’s advances). Even so, her friendships ...”

“... Elizabeth Hardwick’s terms for the mind at work are revealing. In an essay called ‘Domestic Manners’ which begins with the question ‘How do we live today?’ she reminds us of the duplicity and elusiveness of styles. Just as they seem to ‘the defining imagination’ to look like solid historical facts, they shift and collapse ...”

“... I admire that. It brings to mind Janet Flanner at the Ritz and James Schuyler at the Chelsea.) Joan Didion has often noted transiency’s allure, a writer’s necessary alienation from fixed address. My favourite Didion passage of all time, from The White Album, typifies what I will call ‘hotel prose’: TO PACK AND WEAR:   2 skirts   2 jerseys ...”

“... someone they could talk to.Journalistically, what more could you wish for? ‘It was gold,’ as Joan Didion would say. The historian Taylor Branch visited Bill Clinton secretly at the White House once a month in the 1990s. On his first visit, in the spring of 1993, maxims and epigrams were flying about the place. Bill was quoting Suetonius, Hillary quoted ...”

“... a Bible and a chalice) and Muhammad (turban-sporting and glum) found in the bedchamber of Bess of Hardwick. In This Orient Isle, Jerry Brotton sets out to show that ‘Islam in all its manifestations – imperial, military, cultural, theological and commercial – is part of the national story of England.’ He does this, in part, by turning popular ...”

“... though one cannot be sure, since he is not adept at making his emotional intentions plain. ‘Hardwick suggests that the lady’s knowledge of unpleasantness was’ something or other. Frederic Harrison found ‘the lady in question’ something else. ‘Perhaps the lady was one person with intimates and another person at other times.’ By the time he ...”

“... role in the book. In her early days in Akron, Zambreno has ‘short cropped hair’ and a ‘black Joan of Arc jacket, shiny from years of wear’, which she guesses is ‘perhaps a sartorial revolt from my new, more feminine role’. Later, while immersed in the legend of Zelda Fitzgerald, she buys ‘glittery silver toenail polish from OPI’s Swiss ...”

“... precipitated it. In 1964, Newton, still married to Pearce, fathered a child with a patient called Joan Harvey, a former soap opera actress, whom he then trained as a therapist. In 1969 they had a second child, and around the same time Newton began an affair with another patient, Helen Moses, who also wanted to train under him. The two mistresses, feuding from ...”

“... your foot!Some of this, especially the opera as performed with fervid and overwrought passion by Joan Sutherland as Mary and Huguette Tourangeau as Elizabeth and Pavarotti as Leicester, can take me straight back to my youth. The best music for that, however, is by Robert Schumann. His five songs for Mary Stuart, especially as performed in French by Victoria ...”

“... a modern classic of despair and endurance, like Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Without it, Styron’s reputation might have joined his pal James Jones’s, bobbing in and out of the purgatory of posterity, big-novel authors in danger of being dragged down by their own bulk. I was never a fan of ...”

“... seems to be set on a series of steps which, though the film was shot in the studio, relates it to Hardwick Hall and also to the dream sequences that follow with a stairway to heaven. The steps, coincidentally, chime in with a poem by the recently dead Ian Hamilton printed in the LRB. We are on a kind of stair. The world below Will never be regained; was ...”