“... in my new school.’ Or this strange statement from The Book of Illusions, when the hero’s new lady-friend begins to stroke her breasts, and to trail her fingertips along the inside of her thighs: ‘Hector was not immune to these classic provocations.’ Auster is at his best when he balances the enigmatic and the concrete, as in The Music of Chance ...”

“... the man who wrote to the motoring press urging drivers not to stop after an accident if they had a lady on board was Bernard Shaw. Speed worship began to infect hard-headed urban councils, as one town after another (and not just in Britain) began holding Grand Prix round-the-houses races, or even round-the-houses-and-into-the-trees races. And what sort of ...”

“... a trainee physiotherapist, a renowned doctor who had crossed the Atlantic on a raft, a socialist lady senator, a saxophonist etc. So we prepared for Greene’s visit as usual, although we forgot to put a coathanger in his room (cassocks are not supposed to be hung on coathangers), which apparently embarrassed him. When Greene arrived nobody asked any ...”

“... trouper, Roy Workman, and late in 1926 they set out for Europe calling themselves Lord and Lady Workman-Macnaghten of Belfast. How Louis met Myrtle is not clear, but he quickly detached her from Roy, whom she never divorced. In 1928, in a London Register Office, Myrtle Jones bigamously became Mme Darquier de Pellepoix, despised by Louis’s family and ...”

“... his conviction that the king was leading the country back to a Commonwealth or his description of Lady Denham, the Duke of York’s mistress, ‘bitchering’. For most of his married life, Evelyn lived at Sayes Court, Deptford, of which nothing at all remains. Apart from an idealised plan of the garden, only descriptions in letters and building accounts give ...”

“... 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 ...”