“... Falling victim to the American joke, the young Ellison embarrassed himself and his host Langston Hughes by laughing loudly and uncontrollably – stopping the Broadway show of Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre – at the sexual grotesqueries of white trash; the shock of seeing the blackface stereotype of physicalised excess transferred to poor whites ...”

“... I can’t make out. Either would please me.Judging from newspaper reports, the congregation at Ted Hughes’s memorial service in Westminster Abbey was an odd mixture, with a surprising number of old aristocratic biddies (the oldest being the Queen Mother), and society (the dead poet’s society, I suppose) well represented. It’s no secret that the ...”

“... Forest? The long-haired freak who shoots up Coca-Cola in ‘Come Together’ is, of course, Howard Hughes. And did you ever notice that the famous Abbey Road cover shot is centred around a vanishing point?Again, it’s hard to think of anything comparable involving the Stones. There is a certain amount of minor-key keening around the ‘mysterious’ death of ...”

“... said to them, but she had met T.S. Eliot, too, and there was Priestley and Philip Larkin and even Ted Hughes, to whom she’d taken a bit of a shine but who remained nonplussed in her presence. And it was because she had at that time read so little of what they had written that she could not find anything to say and they, of course, had not said much of ...”