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“... four years ago, but many of the pictures were taken in the 1970s – not an easy time to be a drag queen in Boston. To Goldin her friends were ‘stars’ – and that’s how she photographed them.The advantage of a slideshow over a film, Goldin has said, is that a slideshow can be ‘constantly re-edited’, as these were ...”

“... Assia would afterwards meet clandestinely in London, until an argument during a visit by Plath’s mother, Aurelia, caused Hughes to leave Plath. In the late summer, Hughes writes to Olwyn that ‘things are quite irrevocable,’ and recounts a dream – a frequent subject in his letters – in which ‘Hitler came to me, furious, demanding that I carry out ...”

“... that we might shortly be privileged to see her (just before her canonisation along with her pal, Mother Teresa) with an entirely shaved head. I await the moment with quiet excitement. Tempered steel is emerging from the nondescript little girl whose marital suffering has made a woman of her. Once praised merely for ‘being, not for doing’, she has decided ...”

“... of pages of notes on Hume, Montesquieu and Blackstone. From his beloved tutor Lord Bute and his mother, Augusta, who founded the Royal Botanic Gardens, he derived a love of botany – Kew was for years his favourite residence and strolling ground. He played the harpsichord, piano, flute and organ, sometimes accompanied on the keyboard by J.C. Bach. Frugal ...”

“... Consider, Herr Doktor, some of the diagnostic highlights: 1. The Family Romance. Shady Prostitute-Mother and Unknown Father. Precocious Sexual Enlightenment. Bernhardt’s mother, an elegant and pragmatic Dutch courtesan called Youle van Hard, trained her daughter from infancy for the life of a grande horizontale. Which is ...”

“... Yet Castle rests in public memory (if at all) as a class warrior, the abrasive, too stylish Red Queen, while the personable, sartorially challenged Williams is thought of as reasonable, classless and comfortably middle of the road. This, again, isn’t quite right. Williams isn’t a liberal or a centrist but a social ...”

“... Southerners who divorced during his childhood, which was divided between Tennessee and California, mother and grandparents. (Pritchard very effectively relates the return of letters written by him to his mother in this period with the writing of the last poems.) From the time he went at the age of 18 to Vanderbilt and ...”

“... a hereditary disorder aggravated by a troubled childhood – as the unwanted son of a domineering mother caught in an unwanted marriage to a weak husband. The book is compassionate and sardonic in tracing the rises and falls, the grimness and the painful comedies, of Lowell’s career. Lowell saw the joke himself, and was helped by seeing it: Hamilton sees ...”

“... the destructive maternity of nature in Stevens’s ‘Madame La Fleurie’: His grief is that his mother should feed on him, himself and what he saw, In that distant chamber, a bearded queen, wicked in her dead light. Glück’s poem too arrives at a commanding impersonality. Looking ...”

“... There were his endless illusions about people: it is typical that when he was trying to save his mother’s life he employed two agents who had sold out to the English, and that when he was trying to ensure his succession to the English throne he chose Essex as his ally. There was his constant illusion that an alliance with Spain would be possible and ...”

“... escape with as little human interaction as possible. The cab rolled up outside the BBC studios on Queen Street, and he was just about to hurry away when the driver crooked a finger to bring him closer. ‘With your height,’ he said, ‘and the weight of your chin, I’d recommend a hat with a broader brim.’ David ...”

“... been hospitalised, and reported regularly for electroshock therapy years after his release. His mother also had depression, and one of his nephews had schizophrenia. But for mid-century American psychologists investigating the mental health of Don’s children, nothing was as salient as Mimi’s perfectionism. Everyone knew that she’d had a dozen children ...”

“... Elton​ John was born Reg Dwight in 1947 in the north-west London suburb of Pinner. His mother was a nightmare, his father a bully. He was a boy who did not start thinking about sex until he was 21. While he shared an interest in football with his father – they both supported Watford – his father didn’t approve of his taste in music ...”

“... it was tricky to pin him down. His father was a yeoman with a substantial interest in brewing, his mother was a gentlewoman. He was thus himself a bit of a hybrid, and would always remain so. The accounts of Our Lady’s Gild of Boston gave their comfortably middle-aged attorney (he was now in his thirties) the gentleman’s title of master. Cromwell was the ...”

“... with one of those monosyllabically titled best-sellers filled with fashion tips (‘The Queen would not agree to extravagant expenditure on her clothes and neither did I’) wine-dark prose and exotic settings, as others on their uppers have done before her. She writes to Bob in 1981 after their final ...”