“... of Les Temps modernes were published, her play, Les Bouches inutiles, was put on, and her stock rose again. She became the literary equivalent of Dior’s New Look, and a tabloid figure: being called ‘la grande Sartreuse’ or ‘Notre-Dame de Sartre’ made her laugh, but she found it ‘repugnant’ to be looked up and down like a ‘dissolute ...”

“... wrote also to Georgie, expressing the hope that she would come to Galway soon before the floods rose above Ballylee, the ruined castle which Yeats had bought a year earlier. Georgie, in the meantime, had been brought by Yeats to meet Maud Gonne and Iseult. Maud wrote to Yeats: I find her graceful & beautiful, & in her bright picturesque dresses, she will ...”

“... loyalties are evolving should not be hustled into either-or holding pens, let alone subjected to Norman Tebbit’s cricket test. Powell’s predictions for the sizes of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population turned out to be pretty accurate. His grim predictions of race war did not. But the most immediately repellent feature of the speech is its ...”

“... of the week, the month and the year. Inmates shout over the partitions, requesting updates.Lulu Norman has done well by BineBine’s original, as Linda Coverdale did by Jelloun’s. Both books belong to a small corpus of detention narratives, fact and fiction, set in the Hassan era. Most, including Diouri’s memories of Dar el-Mokri, are stories we’d ...”

“... of ‘anti-Bolshevik old buffers’. These recruits were so markedly superior that they rapidly rose to positions of power and influence. Given the nature of the Thirties intelligentsia, it was pretty well inevitable that these recruits should have included at least a few who were to turn out to be Soviet moles. The second change followed from the fact ...”

“... pips. The roses are as convincingly vulgar, the pips as pointedly impure, as the gaudy flowers and rose-patterned paper and eating in the street that MacNeice praised in his 1937 radio talk ‘In Defence of Vulgarity’. Impurities like these were worth getting into poetry as a kick against St Paul. MacNeice says in Modern Poetry that ‘words like ...”

“... and that Lois herself had been a high-school supporter of the Socialist Party of America under Norman Thomas and perhaps, at university, an admirer of the young militants whose star rose in the party during the early 1930s. Lois sends a funny letter to her family in December 1936, responding to ‘Mother’s crack that ...”

“... about them even more than it does about Chaplin. They were nervous and resourceful fighters who rose from the bottom and never forgot it, and they deployed the slapstick aggressions of everyday life as a coarse stimulant and a way of gaining private ends. At the request of Kaufman and Irving Berlin, the producer of The Cocoanuts, Sam Harris, agreed one day ...”

“... he holds a small scroll (a love poem?) while the other, resting between his thighs, toys with a rose. This is a Shakespeare fit to have his poems set as lieder. He is also celebrated as a central figure in German Kunst on the proscenium arch of the Latvian national opera house in Riga, once the city’s German-speaking theatre, where four portrait profiles ...”

“... life in his mind. In the 1980s Mitchell explained how he went about things to a professor called Norman Sims. What Mitchell waited for was ‘the revealing remark’, the thing a subject told him that came up from his unconscious and surprised both of them. Mr Hunter’s revealing remark touched on an incident during his early life when for several years he ...”

“... and Chicago. In 1919, Gertrude married David Nemerov, a window-dresser in the main store who rose to become president of the company. Howard was born in 1920, Diane in 1923 and their sister Renée in 1929. The work that their father put in at the department store, Lubow writes, ‘took place mostly out of the children’s view’. But ‘the attention ...”

“... Studies. ‘I arranged the poems chronologically, starting in Greek and Roman times and finally rose to air and the present with Life Studies. I felt that I had hit the skies, that all cohered. It was mostly waste.’ Quite so. It is striking that, from the start, Lowell is about rewriting. ‘The Exile’s Return’, the opening poem in Lord Weary’s ...”

“... put this together. And now she was going to be gone.’ Some of Bush’s generals were blunter. Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of the US forces, accosted his British counterpart, General de la Billière: ‘Hey Peter, what sort of country have you got there when they sack the prime minister halfway through a war?’It was not a coup, not even a very ...”

“... he spent some years driving a cab and dabbling in philosophy; then joined the Greens and quickly rose to the top as their most flexible and articulate leader. Witty, trenchant, unencumbered with doctrine, he was soon Minister for the Environment in a Red-Green coalition in Hessen, winning the admiration of the press for hard-headed ambition and political ...”

“... marched to the mouth of Limehouse Causeway, through which, in the customary light of grey and rose, many amiable creatures were gliding, levelled his nice new Kodak, and got – an excellent picture of the Causeway after the earthquake. The entire street in his plate was deserted.’ Just another London vanishing: the journalist would have to learn what ...”