“... now having damned everyone,’ she wrote to Lowell in 1959 after she had dissed Stanley Kunitz and Richard Wilbur, ‘I feel awfully cheered up.’) ‘If you want me to,’ she went on, I’d be glad to give you more benefits of my past experience in Rimbaud-translating. (But of course not if you don’t want me to.) … Sometimes it seems to me you sort of ...”

“... her fold up her white metal cane from the Braille Institute and calls her ‘Mavis’ in a polite, Boston-bred, upper-middle-class-lesbian-daughter-in-law way – much as Mary Cheney’s lover, one imagines, addresses her in-laws as ‘Dick’ and ‘Lynne’. B. played squash at Yale – is still v. buff – and has pledged to help me push the wheelchair ...”

“... ascendancy of the machine. ‘Once I slangily asked her how “she cranked up” to do a scene,’ Richard Meryman, who interviewed her for Life, reported. ‘“I don’t crank anything,” she replied: “I’m not a Model T … An actor is not a machine, no matter how much they want to say you are.”’ By the time Arthur Miller met her, the rift Steffens ...”

“... her to England along with Katharine’s ailing sister, Louisa. With them, Alice sailed out of Boston Harbour in November 1884; she would never see America again. For reasons to do with Alice and reasons to do with England, she found her new life – her ‘career of invalidism’, as her biographer Jean Strouse puts it – quite workable. Once her brother ...”

“... to run in tandem, but merge, to become aspects of a single burning emotion.In a letter to his old Boston friend Grace Norton the year he published The Princess Casamassima, James made clear his deep dislike for Ireland, the country of his grandparents. Ireland, he felt, could injureEngland less with [Home Rule] than she does without it … She seems to me an ...”

“... in the flats above and below don’t even know there’s been a fire. This was something else.’ Richard Welsh is a senior officer with the London Fire Brigade. His pager went off at 1.18 a.m. ‘Initially they had six machines there,’ he said. ‘Then they asked for eight, and then ten, and then 15, 20, and then 25. I’m hearing that on the way there, so ...”