“... Moore and Claude Cahun (1920). Thomson’s sharp sketches of the women’s intimates, such as Robert Desnos, Edouard de Max and Henri Michaux, are more successful than the cameo appearances or conversational allusions. Names like Hemingway or Lacan can’t be brought into play without making a thud or a clang. No doubt people at Paris parties in the 1920s ...”

“... screens of trees, it feels provisional and volatile, as if its entire character might drastically alter with the next shift in the political or economic wind.For an English-born reader, America is written in a language deceptively similar to one’s own and full of pitfalls and ‘false friends’. The word nature, for instance, means something different here ...”

“... consequences of large families for poor households. In lines borrowed from the social campaigner Robert Dale Owen, she asked: ‘Is it desirable then, is it moral, for parents to increase their families regardless of the consequences to themselves or the wellbeing to their offspring when a simple, easy, healthy and CERTAIN remedy is within our control?’By ...”

“... Welles sent detailed instructions for additional cuts, but they were ignored. An assistant editor, Robert Wise, was brought in to chop 30 more minutes out of the running time: half of the second half of the film. It was released on a double bill with Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost, and Welles was never again welcomed by the people in Hollywood with the money to ...”

“... not astoundThe virtuous mind.Indeed I also find myself reflecting rather sadly about a couplet of Robert Louis Stevenson. It is what has been so often attacked in later years as child-cult, the literary man pretending to be a child to make himself look sweet: but I think the people who attacked this didn’t recognise the merit of the child cult when it is ...”

“... bewildered relatives and neighbours looked on – the tomboyish Cather doggedly adopted this male alter ego as her primary public identity. She cut her hair short, wore boys’ jackets, ties and caps around town, and regularly signed herself ‘William Cather MD’ in friends’ albums and yearbooks. The denizens of Red Cloud were agog at the pubescent ...”

“... a writer. Katherine Mansfield is both rival and despised friend, a member of the same set, almost alter ego. The compulsion of words united them, and Mansfield’s Journals, like Woolf’s Diary, are a way of practising that compulsion and keeping it in constant exercise. In some degree it is a matter of period and the idea of a feminine style: Gertrude Stein ...”

“... a remittance man was an agreeable kind of life. I had no qualms about being kept. When I showed Robert Graves, who still lives in Majorca, one of those early novels, he was encouraging enough to say that he found it interesting, but added: ‘Since you come from Nottingham, why don’t you write a novel about that?’ I had already written stories set ...”

“... creating unity; only its content was different. Two of Durkheim’s followers, the anthropologists Robert Hertz and Arnold Van Gennep, provide Ben-Amos with the narrative for the ‘Culture’ section. Hertz argued that the death of an individual was the death of a social being and thus a blow to the social order. The community healed this wound by means of ...”

“... Partisan Review, the Kenyon Review and Sewanee Review, with a good deal of auto-canonising. Robert Lowell, almost by default it seemed, was ceded pride of place, the ‘most important American poet now at work’. Lowell and Randall Jarrell, roommates at Kenyon College in the 1930s, and to a lesser extent Berryman too, were big on rating and ...”

“... enjoins everyone to refrain from dogmatism. Though unable to refrain from a hefty side-swipe at Robert Kagan’s Martians, Soros generally abides by his own rules. Thus a liberal concept of human nature is saved, albeit by a curious exaltation of indeterminacy. In his introduction, Todd says that the most disturbing thing about the present situation is ...”

“... manners.Except that now, telling the story, I can’t be sure that it was Ronald Colman and not Robert Donat, who was certainly more likely to be in Leeds and indeed in England and who was known to be shy (and, as Mam said, ‘a martyr to asthma’) and therefore more likely to bolt from the shop.Cherished and admired as a local boy was Eric Portman, who ...”

“... and matching tasselled blue shoes).Having to deal with such people can’t have done much to alter the brothers’ sense of being at odds with a hidebound establishment. That feeling became even more ingrained after they bought Brecqhou, one of the smaller Channel Islands, in 1993. They soon demolished the old manor house and replaced it with a castle ...”

“... death was another reminder of how times have changed: an oldtime star who once enacted his alter ego Ziggy Stardust’s demise as an old-fashioned diva-esque theatrical goodbye-ee, and who more or less staged his own death online, with admirable restraint, impeccable good manners, and a profoundly surprising, legacy-salvaging last work, Blackstar. His ...”

“... a nasty sideswipe at an Atlas-like critic and biographer in Exit Ghost, in which Roth’s familiar alter ego Nathan Zuckerman reviles ‘the dirt-seeking snooping calling itself research’ as ‘just about the lowest of literary rackets’. Roth seemed to find a spot in nearly every novel to insert a minor character based on somebody who had recently vexed ...”