“... Nobody’s ever called Eliot Bolivar’s poems work.’ The invitation is from an ‘old toady lady’ called Madame Crommelynck, who has been passing the poems on to the vicar for publication (Jason hasn’t realised that the vicar no longer lives in the vicarage). Mitchell’s fans last encountered Madame Crommelynck as a teenage temptress in 1920s ...”

“... a newspaper advert offering for sale a hatbox of old letters generates a poem to the unknown lady who wrote them, and a Sears, Roebuck catalogue entry an ode to a dressmaker’s dummy. Something of the faux-naif hovers above his diction, as it does Bishop’s, especially in poems that work up a single conceit, such as ‘On the Death of Friends in ...”

“... appearance – his malacca cane. (Trapnel’s response to the destruction of his last novel by Lady Widmerpool is to hurl his precious cane into the canal where the manuscript is slowly sinking.) At 21, Julian left France to try his luck in London. Publication was still a long way off; in the meantime, he practised for the role of the writer. The ...”

“... Toklas’s oldest friends, the alluring Bobsy Goodspeed: ‘a good-looking, silly-clever Evanston lady, wife of the foremost trustee and lover of the wife of the president of the University of Chicago’. If the description of Bobsy is accurate, the liaison would have been a hair-raising frolic indeed: Bobsy was president of the Arts Club of Chicago and her ...”

“... to market her own image on a truly international scale. She was a self-brander – like Madonna or Lady Gaga – avant la lettre. Painters and sculptors and designers flocked to her. Canny advertisers – especially in America – clamoured to use her picture on trade cards and soap packaging. Virtually every other ‘vintage’ postcard or trade card now to ...”

“... published in 1989 and officially attributed to ‘Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe’ (see also Lady Sings the Blues by ‘Billie Holiday with William Duffy’). Depending on mood, ethnicity, ideology, drug of choice, an oral biography can strike the reader as an authentic reproduction of voice, in all its self-contradictory rhythm and curl – or ...”

“... Monastery blazed in the name of St Francis, who had loved fire and sung hymns to it. Our Lady Street burned for Father and Son at once. Needless to say the Lumber Market, Coal Market and Haymarket burned to the ground. In Baker Street the ovens burned, and the bread and rolls with them. In Milk Pitcher Street the milk boiled over. Only the West ...”

“... a smaller scale, he could always do one-off travesties – things like his send-up of Reynolds’s Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces. Gillray’s parody was called La Belle Assemblée. In place of the gracious solitary aristocrat, multiple ladies are muscling into line for the sacrifice; among them, as Loxton puts it, ‘the rotund, overstuffed Mrs ...”

“... and his chambers shall be full of modesty and comfort; I will bring the east wind over him as a lady of comfort, and she shall sit upon his castles in triumph.’ Here is an edited transcript of Kelley in full flight, in front of the ‘shew-stone’ at the lodgings he shared with Dee in Prague near the Bethlehem Chapel: E.K.: I see a garland of white ...”

“... names by contrast were mostly transparent: King Aelfraed sounded like ‘King Elf-Counsel’, Lady Aethelflaed ‘Lady Noble Beauty’, King Aethelraed ‘King Noble Counsel’. Ancient Greek names were much closer to those of pre-Conquest than post-Conquest England. Just as we translate Native American names such as ...”

“... momentarily consider turning back. ‘We will proceed no further in this business,’ he tells Lady Macbeth, to which she replies: ‘Was the hope drunk/wherein you dressed yourself? Hath it slept since? … Art thou afeard/to be the same in thine own act and valour/as thou art in desire?’ There is no acknowledgment of Macbeth’s misgivings, only ...”

“... in the year, has learned some new poems. So in the darkness of a Penarth bedroom this 90-year-old lady recites Housman’s ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’ and Browning’s ‘Home-Thoughts, from Abroad’. And not a fluff in either.8 August. It is the day after the Tottenham riots and waiting for a prescription in the pharmacy in Camden High Street I ...”

“... Bill Styron becomes the literary darling of Camelot, yachting with the president and the First Lady, who dispense with formalities. ‘We were sitting around a big table in the open cockpit and occasionally she would put her feet up in JFK’s lap and wiggle her toes, just like you’d imagine the wife of the president to do.’ With his famous bugle-call ...”

“... became the most popular playwright of the Edwardian age. There were a few false starts, but Lady Frederick was an unexpected hit in 1907, and soon he had four plays running simultaneously in London. Most of his drawing-room comedies have been forgotten, although The Constant Wife, The Circle and For Services Rendered are said to stand up quite well. And ...”

“... a Doll’s House (1996), chronicling the dissolution of the marriage with the wounded stoicism of Lady Marchmain, Updike noted with a shrug: ‘And to think that my friendly little review broke it up. Well, you never …’With the villainous Gore Vidal (said with utmost respect), there was never a falling out because there was never a falling in. He and ...”