“... on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy ...”

“... on West Side Story (1957), where he worked in lofty company – writer Arthur Laurents, composer Leonard Bernstein and director Jerome Robbins. The show was not just a hit but a turning point in musical theatre. Today, Sondheim feels he sometimes had the Jets and Sharks speaking too archly or poetically – his aim is to write natural, conversational ...”

“... Bloomsbury, becoming a radical, anti-conformist appeal to individual choice along the way. Somehow Leonard Woolf’s socialism and Keynes-as-Bloomsberry are written out of this story, in which core values are undermined by a brilliant new scepticism: Lytton Strachey’s eagle-eyed Eminent Victorians (1918) is apparently a turning point. With Hayek’s success ...”

“... at Princeton, to which she had just donated them. She was by then in a wheelchair. Perhaps she read this letter, which uniquely reveals how creativity can be invested in the image of one person: What not only matters but is also absolutely necessary for me this moment is to think that I’m writing for you ... I follow this image of you, in the situations ...”

“... to a dead wife. But the plucking out of harsh views on friends and fellow writers (as with Leonard Woolf’s and James Strachey’s edition of Virginia Woolf’s correspondence with Lytton Strachey) was inevitable. The truth is that Murry added nothing to Katherine’s writing that was not already there, that he made her popular, and that he kept her ...”

“... to Clive Bell, a number of the Bloomsbury set first heard ‘Prufrock’ in 1917, when Mansfield read it at Garsington: it ‘caused a stir, much discussion, some perplexity’. A short time later Eliot and Mansfield met at a dinner party in Hammersmith (Robert Graves was also present) where, she wrote, Eliot ‘grew paler and paler and more and more ...”

“... Owmby-by-Spital in Lincolnshire. He was 17 years old and ‘long-haired, very handsome, very well read, a huge Bob Dylan fan’.Taupin moved in with the singer previously known as Reg; they slept in bunk beds in the second bedroom of the flat owned by Reg’s mother and her new husband in Frome Court in Pinner. ‘We would spend the days writing,’ Elton ...”

“... and was ‘briefly noted’ in the New Yorker. It sold around 1700 copies: those who wanted to read about a doleful scholar with a problematic wife didn’t show up en masse until September, when Viking also published Saul Bellow’s Herzog. In February 1966, however, an appreciation by Irving Howe of Williams’s ‘serious, beautiful and affecting ...”

“... now eager students stream to programmes like those of the Paideia Institute, where they not only read but speak, sing and rap in Latin while on summer courses in Rome. I have heard them in the basement of Pompey’s theatre, singing about the career of Julius Caesar in Latin, to the tune of ‘My Darling Clementine’ – and seen them, on the Appian ...”

“... first three volumes in the Observer and proclaiming it ‘without doubt a great book’. Leonard Woolf called its scope ‘magnificent’. J.L. Hammond hailed its publication as ‘a deeply significant event’. A cynical view of such judgments is that they came from friends, or at least from sympathetic liberal internationalists who warmed to the ...”

“... in the shadow of an anti-colonial uprising against British rule in Mesopotamia, the archaeologists Leonard and Katharine Woolley dug up the ruins of the ancient city of Ur in present-day Iraq. Near a ziggurat they unearthed evidence of the life and verse of the Sumerian priestess Enheduana. She was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, said to have created the ...”

“... dozen programmes are alone worth the licence fee.27 July. A flying visit to Norfolk, where I am to read at the Holt Festival. Rather than hang about all morning R. sensibly gets us off to look at two churches at Warham, both medieval but with one done up in the 18th century. As we look round the first church (which has three fonts) there is some sort of ...”

“... more than half a century earlier. Homosexual acts had just been decriminalised (although Grant read the manuscript before that happened and asked: ‘Shall I be arrested?’), but it was still unnerving to have one’s private life put on display. A year earlier Peter Stansky and William Abrahams had published Journey to the Frontier, a joint Life of ...”

“... expertise in different ways: sometimes friends tell me what the latest scoop is; sometimes I read about it in the papers; sometimes I hear about it from official pronouncements, governmental and professional; sometimes – and this tends to work on me – I encounter expertise face-to-face in a doctor’s surgery when I’m feeling more vulnerable than ...”

“... morning/Is different, my dear one’), and another is so-so, but some time in the 1970s, having read Auden’s City Without Walls, Grigson wrote an Epistle in which he excelled himself: Green pillows of cress In the brook which begins us You celebrate too; And up from your verses, Though many Forget them, stinking Ogres not ...”