“... touring players, and began her own stage career at the age of six. Ten years later, she married a painter three times her age; they separated within ten months. Three years after that, she took up with the architect Edward William Godwin. They did not marry, but had a daughter and son together, and the expense of their upkeep drove her back to the stage. Her ...”

“... New York, the South or the West. It has often been said that Isabel Archer is an imitation of George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke, but it is apparent from all the novels of James which have no resemblance to Middlemarch, and from their Emersonian echoes, that The Portrait of a Lady could have brought the theme of aspiration to the point it does without the ...”

“... initial response to Coleman in the jazz world was captured with admirable candour by the composer George Russell, in Shirley Clarke’s documentary Made in America4, as ‘a feeling of apprehension. A feeling of being threatened by this mind of yours.’ Russell confessed to Coleman that ‘when I finally met you … my worst dreams came true. Here was a ...”

“... Dorothy Moore – a retired music-hall chanteuse and the wife of a moral philosopher called George Moore – is going dotty in her bedroom. The precipitating cause is a televised fight between the first two astronauts to land on the Moon about who gets to go back home on a damaged lunar ascent module that can carry only one. Astronaut Scott shoves ...”

“... or lived, the experienced or the deeply needed, that a writer or thinker has found words for, or a painter found images for. It’s possible to miss the real in this sense, to get it wrong, or not care about it. As Auerbach thinks Victor Hugo, for example, doesn’t care about it, he just enjoys mixing ‘the sublime and grotesque’. It’s also possible for ...”

“... book is arranged around a series of intense, often fleeting crushes: a classmate at school, the painter Paul Ehrenberg, his own son Klaus, young men who sit admiringly through his lectures, the architect of his Californian house, sunny boys on the beach, a handsome waiter. These hidden intensities constitute a kind of shadow life, which is strikingly at ...”

“... Day-Lewis began to tire of being in the spotlight, and in 1938 he ‘noiselessly slipped the painter’ of public life, as he put it, retreating to rural seclusion in a cottage in Devon, just inside the border with Dorset. By this point he had been married to his first wife, Mary, for ten years, had two small children, and was growing sexually ...”

“... happiness. ‘Love,’ she asserts in the third of her ‘Three Valentines’, which develops a George Herbert-inspired set of conceits between Love and the avian, ‘is feathered like a bird/To keep him warm,/To keep him safe from harm’. In ‘Rain towards Morning’, one of four love poems collected in A Cold Spring (1955), she exults with unusual lack ...”

“... haven’t even mentioned the earthquake in Peru, the fire at the director’s house, or the blind painter heiress who pays for people to look at the stars), there are extended portions of The Glass Universe which one might fairly term dull. Part of the dullness is unavoidable: meticulously tracking the brightness and position of thousands of stars on ...”

“... One of the most important Kettle’s Yard artists, and one of Ede’s greatest friends, was the painter and poet David Jones, whose long poem In Parenthesis W.H. Auden was not alone in thinking the greatest book about the First World War. It emerged after long gestation. Ede, opening his copy when it arrived one morning in 1937, was at once moved to ...”

“... seems to me the only remedy,’ she once remarked. She was also a prolific and rather successful painter, and founded the Society of Female Artists. There was hardly a scheme for the furtherance of women’s interests that did not bear the imprint of her driving aspirations. The only exception lay in projects sponsored by any branch of Christianity, for ...”

“... him’, and finds himself drawn to various men who seem to know something he doesn’t – the painter of the naked praying woman, an old teacher and poet, a retired Methodist minister. But such revival as he finds comes not from these men outside at the edge of his life, but from the women inside, his wife and her sister. Jacqueline Simms’s ...”

“... Graham Greene figure’, closely studied by Alec Guinness when he was preparing to become George Smiley; he ‘could never make close ties with people’. Guy Burgess was ‘always dirty and smelt’. This diary is also a love story: ‘The sun was shining and Alan took my hand.’ Eva Taylor considers her husband ‘cleverer than Macaulay’, whose ...”

“... zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, and moving into the Altenburg Palace on the outskirts of town; Thackeray, George Eliot, Smetana, Berlioz and Wagner all visited. Liszt engaged better musicians, improved the repertory, old and new, and included his own compositions. He put Weimar back on the cultural map, but didn’t get the support he hoped for from the court. He ...”

“... allowed in were American and the hearings were timed to coincide with US breakfast TV. If George Bush can pretend for four months that he has Iraq under control he may well be re-elected. If disasters from Iraq continue to dominate the front pages he will probably lose. In April 125 soldiers were killed: the White House needs to show voters that ...”