“... of the price) is that it was made by Proust’s tailor. 18 April. A pre-operation session at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson wing of UCH down Huntley Street, in which Siobhan, a nice, cheerful and silly nurse, takes me through the same questionnaire I answered twice last week. She then takes me in to see the anaesthetist, and he goes through the same ...”

“... Charge of the Light Brigade, Cecil was a frail woman with a tiny birdlike skull, looking more like Elizabeth I (in later life) than Edith Sitwell ever did (and minus her sheet metal earrings). Irish, she had a Firbankian wit and a lovely turn of phrase, ‘Do you know the Atlantic at all?’ she once asked me, and I put the line into Habeas Corpus and got a ...”

“... and social-services groups, as well as longtime residents, many of them disabled and elderly. Mary Elizabeth Phillips, who arrived in San Francisco after getting married in 1937, will be 98 when she is driven out of her home of more than half a century. In many other places eviction means you go and find a comparable place to live: in San Francisco that’s ...”

“... operatives. I think he was a great dreamer and a great man’; she said so to her biographer E.K. Brown, who she thought had discounted her investment in this dream of the past. Cather was in her early thirties, on the verge of moving to New York to become an editor at McClure’s, an ambitious monthly magazine, when she published her first story collection ...”

“... lion’, mercury ‘white fume’. The philosopher’s stone was a laboriously produced reddish brown powder, used to promote base metals into precious ones. Even if metals weren’t involved, the aim was still to release power stored in nature so as to produce observable effects. The four elements possessed qualities that could be enhanced or suppressed to ...”

“... to the letter: Elder John is based on Brother Egbert Gillette, who was tried alongside Eldress Elizabeth Sears. Rumours that Marchant was pregnant, and not really at death’s door, were disproved by the medical examiner. (In Banks’s version, the medical examiner gives false testimony about the pregnancy after poor Sadie’s body is exhumed.) In fact, no ...”

“... the title is another line from an advert – imagines what it would be like to drive alongside Elizabeth Taylor in midtown Manhattan (the windshield is a picture of the United Nations building turned on its side). Hamilton produced a few more semi-figurative combinations of sexy commodities and commodified women in a sustained attempt ‘to capture those ...”

“... The interiors are bedrooms and bars, basements and dank living rooms, wallpapered or splattered brown or plastered with notes and images. As the sequence progresses, associations form, with visual jokes and provocative contrasts. Mouths keep mashing against ears, chins, other mouths; arms wrap themselves around necks and waists; hands hold other hands. Her ...”

“... current work in circulation were two typescripts of dictated material, The Blue Book and The Brown Book, which were copied and passed around among the initiated. In spite of Austin’s later denials of the influence of Wittgenstein and the Cambridge School, Rowe makes a plausible case, based on internal evidence, that Austin had read The Blue Book before ...”

“... The birth​ of Queen Elizabeth II’s second and, by court rumour, favourite son was attended by a bad fairy. A spell, with emphatic italics for second, was derived from a shuffled conjuring of newspaper reports. The conjurer, a person of many masks and disguises, was hiding out in a Left Bank ghost hotel and wielding his Stanley knife like one of those crazy surgeons in a routine by William Burroughs ...”

“... appear works that are certainly not by Rochester, because they are known to be by other people, by Elizabeth Rochester, Sir George Etherege, Sir Carr Scroope and John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave. Well-known poems turn up under the rubric ‘Writings for the theatre’ even when no evidence of a theatrical intent can be adduced; thus the fragment in ...”

“... responsible. The Suez Canal, according to a recent history of the WHO by Marcos Cueto, Theodore Brown and Elizabeth Fee, made Europeans feel ‘dangerously close to India’.† In 1900 the fear was the imminent completion of a railway line linking Berlin to Mecca, seen as a cholera hotbed.Cholera, which returned to ...”

“... own polite loathing of her grand yet self-absorbed mother. In the mordantly sapphic novels of Elizabeth Bowen, older women are depicted as seductive and treacherous – enchanting sociopaths who leave the younger women who fall in love with them both shell-shocked and vengeful. (See in particular Bowen’s brilliant first novel, The Hotel, of 1927.) In ...”

“... and Oxford and Cambridge colleges, as well as the homes of Garrick, Sterne, Lancelot (Capability) Brown and Burke, who all subscribed to The Antiquities of Athens. Succeeding volumes took decades to appear and Stuart saw only the first of them through the press. Gradually, however, their effect was felt and the society presided, as J. Mordaunt Crook put ...”

“... toreador is), plots a ‘perfect’ car crash in which his own vehicle will collide with Elizabeth Taylor’s (not a stand-in this time, but the actual actress – that is, the genuine stand-in) at the precise moment of his orgasm: a supremely wrought marriage of techne, spectacle, sex, death and all the rest. He finds out when her car will pass such ...”