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“... Abroad, the most serious responses to his work seem to have come from England, where Raymond Williams wrote an admiring critique of his conception of nature, proposing an alternative materialist sensibility, and Charles Rycroft, from within psychoanalysis, largely endorsed his account of parapraxes. New Left ...”

“... queued as a boy to see at the Picturedrome on Wortley Road. Here were Alexis Smith, Eve Arnold, Charles Boyer, and Tarzan’s Jane (and Mia Farrow’s mother) Maureen O’Sullivan. The four of us from Beyond the Fringe had been invited as a unit and Dudley Moore had been prevailed on (may even have volunteered) to play the piano. With Coward in the room ...”

“... as is suggested by the above-cited cases of Mary Toft (1703-63, ‘the rabbit-breeder’) and Sir Charles Isham (1819-1903, ‘rural improver and gardener’). The ODNB’s greater inclusiveness is one of the ways it differs not just from its predecessor but also from Who’s Who, often regarded in the 20th century as the ante-chamber to the DNB. In that ...”

“... have been writing. Some examples: ‘She had a face like an upturned canoe,’ said by the actor Charles Gray at breakfast in Dundee (though of whom I can’t remember). A. I’ve been salmon fishing. B. It’s not the season. A. No. I thought I’d take the blighters by surprise. ‘Here we are. Fat Pig One and Fat Pig Two.’ Said by my mother when ...”

“... much relish. She was ‘a good drinker’, Leader says of the Swansea original of Mrs Gruffydd-Williams, and while one feels this is very much an Amis-type judgment, it’s not one Leader dissents from – or dissents from sufficiently, drink and good fellowship equated throughout. Never having been able to drink much, partly through not having been ...”

“... but these days not permitted. 20 May. Nick Hytner is in the second week of rehearsals of Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending at the Donmar. We chat in Maggie Smith’s dressing-room in the interval of The Lady in the Van, Maggie saying that Tennessee Williams had a distinctive laugh and when she was playing Hedda ...”

“... a letter from mother of stale news she’d already relayed over the phone, a card from Oscar Williams inviting us to a cocktail party in New York on the impossible last day of my classes. No news.’ In late 1959, waiting for short story acceptances that would not come, she wrote in her journal: ‘Must not wait for mail as it ruins the day.’ Then the ...”

“... Baldwin identified with her too, as he told Weatherby when he was introduced to him by Tennessee Williams. Not that Weatherby was the only writer on Monroe to spot these moments of what might seem like odd affinity. Lee Strasberg’s daughter, Susan, remembered a self-portrait Monroe drew alongside a sketch of a Negro girl in ‘a sad-looking dress, one sock ...”

“... Eva Le Gallienne, Katharine Cornell, Ona Munson, Teddie Gerard, Tallulah Bankhead and Hope Williams; the rakish lesbian salonnière Natalie Barney; Dolly Wilde (Oscar’s opium-addicted niece); Marie Laurencin, painter and friend of Picasso; the Ballets Russes dancer Tamara Karsavina; the photographer Berenice Abbott; modernist designer Eileen ...”

“... that he must have been whistling. Martha, Lucy, Maureen, Josie … Margaret Martinson Roth née Williams made quite an impact. In The Facts, Roth comes close to saying that the idealistic values instilled in him by his parents delivered him up to Maggie’s manipulations; or rather, he does say so, but then (this being the structural trick of the book) he ...”

“... and the sense of class rebellion of one sort or another coalescing on Portobello Road. Heathcote Williams and his friends wrote graffiti around the streets. ‘We teach all hearts to break,’ it said on the wall of the Isaac Newton School on Lancaster Road. ‘Squat Now While Stocks Last’ on Marsh and Parsons, the estate agent on Kensington Park ...”