“... visitors who refused to leave?’ In the context of so much pious theorising about ‘intransitive love’, the ‘mutual guardianship of solitude’ (Rilke’s definition of marital bliss) and the sacrosanctity of the artist’s vocation, such plain speaking comes as a refreshing surprise. All the same, Rilke’s treatment of his wife and child makes, by and ...”

“... been stirred to his depths, perhaps, by Sylvia Plath’s implied response – about the female love for a fascist and a boot in the face – but she didn’t specify that a versifier was required to put the leather in. Nor, it turns out, did you have to be Jewish, or an alcoholic, or a Marxist, or even, much of the time, a New Yorker. Robert Lowell, for ...”

“... I think it is two years since I’ve been to the cinema. This is something of a mystery to me, like love gone wrong: in fact, it is love gone wrong. Was the love misguided in the first place, have I simply aged out of the way of love, or has the beloved altered beyond all recognition? Naturally, lovers whose love is depleted are inclined to think the last: it makes them feel better, less fickle, less hopeless, that the loss is not their own fault ...”

“... quite different sorts of writing. They may, as Jonathan Raban’s title suggests, be working for love as well as money, and it is easy to understand their wish to give their best work in this kind a more permanent form. Raban has some engaging remarks on this subject. As he says, very few people can now make a living by writing reviews; he thinks, perhaps ...”

“... attack in Ladbroke Grove. His last words, apparently, were ‘Graham Greene’ and then: ‘I love you.’ Obituaries expressed regret that Maclaren-Ross never wrote the great novel that had been expected of him, although friendly comments were made about ‘The Weeping and the Laughter’, a superb and enragingly incomplete recollection of his early ...”

“... after she’d been to visit Diana Cooper in France. ‘Mr Gaitskell came to lunch and fell in love with Diana ... He had never seen cocktails with mint in them or a magnum of pink champagne. He was very happy. I lied and told him that all the upper class were beautiful and intelligent and he must not allow his vermin to destroy them.’ Mrs Fleming wrote ...”

“... it is the unexpected analogy that makes the point. Or compare Orwell’s line with this, by Harold Rosenberg: ‘No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.’ This is altogether more balanced and pointed. Sometimes one finds these qualities and others even more valuable: ‘It is desirable at ...”

“... several times to the subject of his brother and wrote at some length: but then he flaunted his love of America and American ways. Their contributions have been more rigorous, factual and detailed and include a study of Waugh’s life up to 1939 and a Checklist of Primary and Secondary Material, while there is a whole book about his relationship with his ...”

“... 1937 of the 14-year-old Garland with a sweet, rounded face and kiss curls singing ‘You Made Me Love You’ as a fan letter to Clark Gable, with a scrapbook of his pictures propped in front of her. The recording comes from a film called Broadway Melody of 1938 in which Garland stars with Robert Taylor and Eleanor Powell. It was her first feature-length film ...”

“... From then on, an association with Bevan has been an asset to conjure with for an aspiring leader. Harold Wilson built his platform for the leadership in 1963 largely on a spurious leftism derived from his resignation with Bevan from the faltering Attlee Cabinet 12 years earlier, and he never ceased to milk his memory for flagrantly sentimental ...”

“... room at the Amalienburg near Munich – baroque and rococo and what-ho and oh-no-no and all that.Harold​ Nicolson was writing to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, in February 1936 after dining with the Channons: Honor and her husband, Henry, whom everyone knew by his nickname ‘Chips’, but who wasn’t Lord Channon, much as he longed to be. ‘Why am I not ...”

“... to which Miners in the Snow was indebted. In similar fashion, Van Gogh would later fall in love with the intentions conveyed by Puvis de Chavannes in an allegorical frieze: in his approach to pictures, meaning would always remain primary.A greater accommodation is required as you pass to the second part of the show. These later rooms explore the ways ...”

“... Immediately beforehand, Stefan has been politely snubbed by a distinguished elder statesman named Harold Gedney. His hostess introduces him as ‘a wonderful dissident poet’ who has fled from East Germany some years before. Bearing what he calls ‘the various inaccuracies of her introduction’ in silence, Stefan is left there blinking as Gedney makes an ...”

“... dressed entirely in white. She was ‘wild as Ophelia’, Woolf wrote, but ‘alas no Hamlet would love her, with her powdered spots.’ There are endless snapshots of Woolf, but the NPG show has managed to find some unfamiliar ones, a series taken by Ottoline Morrell when Woolf came to stay at Garsington Manor in June 1926. It’s possible that her look of ...”

“... who admire her for writing openly and with humour about sex and gender and power and abjection. I Love Dick is ‘the most important book about men and women written in the last century’, Emily Gould claimed a couple of weeks ago in the Guardian. ‘Deeply feminist, formally both out of control and expertly in control,’ Sheila Heti wrote in the Believer ...”