“... On​ 12 December 1884, Henry James took a break from writing the novel that would be published as The Princess Casamassima and went on a research trip to Millbank Prison on the north bank of the Thames. The prison was swampy, labyrinthine and dark. In the novel, Hyacinth Robinson, an impressionable young bookbinder, goes there to visit his dying mother, whose criminal past, we soon learn, has a central role in her son’s mentality and is a cause of his undoing, as he becomes lost in a London filled with social venom and anarchist plots ...”

“... and divide into two the poet and his poems. This poet, however, believed in a poetry which ‘took the whole man’, so that it is possible to propose that his poetry may have ‘taken’ the calamity of his breakdowns. ‘My mind’s not right,’ Lowell says in ‘Skunk Hour’. And the doctors could not put it right. Lowell distrusted ...”

“... not Stalinist terror, was the chief threat Russia faced. Yet Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, remained captive to the fantasy of rolling back communism in Eastern Europe rather than containing it (as Kennan had been advocating). When US propaganda outlets encouraged Hungarian dissidents to rebel against their government, then failed to ...”

“... Nasser may leave description unbeggared but Kyle nonetheless conveys its piquancy. This meeting took place in February 1955 at the British Embassy in Cairo, which Eden was visiting in his capacity as Churchill’s Foreign Secretary. Eden took the opportunity to exercise not only his legendary charm but also the Arabic for ...”

“... was at war with internationally-dominant trends in ego psychology. His short analytic sessions took liberties with practices that others saw as sacred. And in relations with colleagues, Lacan disturbed the peace by insisting that traditional psychoanalytic societies undermined psychoanalytic truths. With the no confidence vote, Lacan resigned his ...”

“... in 1911, Milosz was born a subject of the Czar. His father, an engineer of roads and bridges, took home and office with him on his travels throughout the vast Russian empire, and this mode of life continued until the end of the First World War. But this childhood instability was offset by a strong sense of regional belonging: for generations Milosz’s ...”

“... as Bert – that is, provincial working-class or just over the border into lower-middle. They took it for granted that when they grew up they would earn their own living, but instead of settling for domestic service or working in a shop they aimed at something higher; they mostly trained to be teachers. Their early education was sketchy (Jessie left ...”

“... After​ reading five hundred pages of Gary Lutz, I opened Google Maps and took a long, hard look at the state where he was born: Pennsylvania, the ‘Keystone State’, although it’s shaped more like a ticket stub fished from a back pocket, is entirely recognisable in his descriptions. ‘I lived in a town that had sourceless light falling over it at all hours ...”

“... kid to a party at his home in the Holmby Hills. Dunne knew he was out of his element there, but he took it all in: Judy Garland and Sinatra singing ‘impromptu’ with a hired piano player. All the stars. ‘Before the night was over,’ he writes, ‘people jumped in the pool in their party clothes. I jumped in, too. I wanted to be a part of it. I thought to ...”

“... tied by an early marriage to the demanding, fickle, hypochondriac Edward Burne-Jones, who first took sick on their wedding night – the intended honeymoon was in Paris, but they got no further than Chester. The Macdonald family’s origins were modest. They were from Methodist stock, their paternal grandfather had been ordained by Wesley. Their ...”

“... pick up a scrap of paper from the front step. It reads: ‘Just remember I am a witch.’ Ooh-er. John Huston referred to the three Guinness girls, of whom Maureen was one, as ‘lovely witches’. To say that someone was brought up as a wealthy, landed aristocrat (moneyed, narcissistic mother; aristocratic, fey father) is tantamount to saying they had a ...”

“... and live according to the dynamics of the countryside rather than the urban ff furioso; she took a meditative turn against ‘the getting and spending [that] lay waste our powers’. In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise (2011) by the American writer George Prochnik shows how ideas of silence slide from literal to figurative ...”

“... as warm as the paternity trail ever gets. It doesn’t help, as Baker also recorded, that Haywood took steps to have posthumous information about herself suppressed ‘from a Supposition of some improper Liberties being taken with her Character after Death by the Intermixture of Truth and Falshood with her History’. Only four of her letters survive, all of ...”

“... The supposed military success has revived the previously languishing campaign of the hawkish John McCain, who will now almost certainly be his party’s candidate for the presidency. Seldom has the official Iraqi and American perception of what is happening in Iraq felt so different from the reality. Barricaded behind the walls of the Green ...”

“... drinking and brawling less, and reading, smoking and gambling more. Yet this ‘levelling up’ took place in a context of widespread social conservatism. If people were better-fed, the British diet was still over-refined, over-sweet and intensely unimaginative (grapefruit, one memoir recalled, was thought ‘a Babylonian touch’). They may have been ...”