“... ludicrously fake British accent that he reminds her of Thurston Howell III on Gilligan’s Island. William Styron is almost as monstrous as Hellman herself: self-centred, nervy, and savage with contempt for anyone who gets in his way. When he accidentally burns the fancy pan-fried quail he is preparing for Hellman and her friends in Hellman’s kitchen one ...”

“... tall, graceful buildings contain e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams.Eliot cast the longest shadow on the mid-century generation, not simply because of the brilliance of the poetry and essays: he was both the model and the anti-model for the New Criticism (espoused by Lowell and Jarrell’s teachers John ...”

“... a literary brilliance’, Pacino writes, and introduced him to many writers, such as William Carlos Williams. This was the late 1950s, and Pacino says he would often go to an automat with a book and make a single cup of coffee last for hours. Laughton also encouraged him in his Shakespearean ambitions: Pacino’s audition piece was ‘O, what a ...”

“... highly recommended. From Paris, it was on to New York. Meeting Partisan Review’s co-editor William Phillips at a party, Sontag, now a single mother living on a shoestring, got right to business: ‘How do you write a review for Partisan Review?’ ‘You ask,’ Phillips replied. ‘I’m asking,’ she said, and, open sesame, she was in. The ...”

“... Paying Attention has the spirit of his best non-fiction, that of the set-apart morning, with a ray shining on the page. It both demonstrates his greatest gift and represents the desire to have this part of him set alone from the rest. Experiment:​ use my brain damage to travel back to a time when we did not know this about him. The memory wipe I ...”

“... a book.’ It is worth noting​ how unerring Berlin’s taste was. She spoke of both Chekhov and William Carlos Williams as models. Her characters read Middlemarch the way other people read Flowers in the Attic: dangling from one hand. The editor of A Manual for Cleaning Women, Stephen Emerson, describes exchanging books with her. He gave her Dreiser once ...”

“... I feel certain, got it more quickly. ‘How long were you in Vietnam?’ he was asked in 1975 by William Heath, who later edited Conversations with Robert Stone (2016). Heath’s flat question was impossible to ignore. ‘Just a couple of months, something under three months,’ Stone said, ‘which is, I admit, not very long, but all I can tell you is every ...”

“... was also a family friend with an eclectic record collection, and Eno fell especially hard for the Ray Conniff Singers and their ‘lush, soft, silky quality’. Muzak raptures! US cool entwined with European abstraction, brash spontaneity folded into systematic grids: everything here is a seed.Eno’s male relatives were happy tinkerers, bricoleurs, amateur ...”

“... 1960s pop-rock before its larky brashness got lost in earnest philosophising. I see the young Ray Davies – an ambiguous girly-boy who hymned his cheap-suit backstreet bohemia over blackout power chords – as Smith’s John the Baptist. Horses betrays a love of early Kinks, Them, Who, but reframes their riffy aesthetic with studied artfulness. How much ...”

“... briefly on 18 June, but not seconded; several of his powerful friends, including Marvell and Sir William Davenant, whom Milton had saved from execution as a Royalist conspirator under the Commonwealth, helped to rescue him. The recollection of images from Macbeth might also contain a trace of subconscious regicide guilt. Milton may have had the regicide ...”

“... the Central Park concert, put her off the stage for the next 27 years. It was time for Hollywood.Ray Stark​ , the producer of Funny Girl, formed a production company to make it into a movie. After some wrangling, he signed Streisand on a non-exclusive four-picture deal, agreeing to pay her $200,000 per film. She arrived in Hollywood having never done a ...”

“... about the future is a lens for apprehending the present: Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is an X-ray of 1948, and so forth. Lem himself, in an interview, pointed out that Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’ isn’t better than The Castle for having come true. Then again, perhaps these two things are really one: to bring oneself to see the present is to see ...”

“... about whose life we know very little emerges by this measure as the undisputed Top British Person: William Shakespeare (1564-1616, ‘playwright and poet’) is allotted more than 30,000 words, a length achieved only by devoting a large proportion of them to various aspects of his literary after-life – about which, of course, we know a good deal more. The ...”

“... was living. We know what he painted: in 1933, when he was 23, his Crucifixion that looks like an X-ray; eleven years later, the contortions of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. But what was going on in his mind is a matter for speculation. In October 1940, his asthma exacerbated by the dust from the bombing, he left London and moved to a ...”

“... wondered if his Resistance past was a myth, all part of the same persona as his Stetson and Ray-Bans. Thanks to two recent books – Bertrand Teissier’s biography Jean-Pierre Melville: Le Solitaire and Jean-Pierre Melville, une vie, an unusually illuminating coffee-table book by the film critic Antoine de Baecque – we have a much fuller picture not ...”