“... on, sustained by his mother’s favourite quotation (which stands as the novel’s epigraph): Anne Frank’s ‘In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.’ But, of course, Anne wrote that before the Germans got her. Thomas Keneally likes to run his fiction close to historical fact. An appended note to A Family Madness indicates ...”

“... early forties, she determined to break free, so she hooked up with a guy sixteen years her junior, Frank Perry, who wanted to be a film director. They had a few years of activity together in the 1960s. She wrote and he directed: David and Lisa, The Swimmer and Diary of a Mad Housewife. They were in the money and the awards, and they were married. Joan ...”

“... its incorporation of stray materials, the personal touch on the elbow that the American poet Frank Bidart, a close friend and associate of Lowell’s, ‘both amanuensis and sounding-board’ for the many books of sonnets, has brought to it. (A no doubt garbled account once reached me of Lowell flying Bidart across the Atlantic, so that he could fix ...”

“... I still like to believe that players like Pancho Gonzales, Rod Laver, Lew Hoad, Jaroslav Drobny, Frank Sedgman, Don Budge and Jack Kramer were as good if not better than the present lot – Sampras, Agassi, Moya, Kafelnikov, Rios and so on. The only first-class pre-World War Two player I ever saw was Henri Cochet, who had occasionally beaten the great Tilden ...”

“... him), there could be no question of their living together so long as her ghastly husband, the Rev. Frank Besant, was still alive. Born poor, Bradlaugh never lost his sympathy for the poor classes he came from. His father was a solicitor’s clerk, his mother a nurse, and he left school at the age of 11 to work as a wharf clerk in a coal merchant’s. Never ...”

“... her to maintain her sanity while under house arrest. While she was at Oxford, she met her husband, Michael Aris. She was not an outstanding student, Wintle finds: ‘the moralist in Suu Kyi tended . . . towards assertion of what she instinctively knew,’ rather than argument and exposition. In the 1970s and 1980s she followed her husband as he built his ...”

“... wooing by ingesting and recasting his doctrines and preferred idioms. Memoirs in Oxford is also frank – too frank for Hill, who complains that the poem is ‘ridden by the hag Sincerity’ – about Prince’s state of Prufrockian wretchedness and indecision during his undergraduate years: So old, so battered, so ...”

“... By​ the time his first opera, The Midsummer Marriage, had its premiere at Covent Garden in 1955, Michael Tippett was considered, alongside Benjamin Britten, the most significant and original British composer of his generation. Yet he was also the natural outsider in a scene that as well as Britten (born 1913), included William Walton (1902) and Lennox Berkeley (1903), with the reassuring presence of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872) hovering over them all ...”

“... day differently. She had fainted when a Black man burst, axe in hand, into her bedroom: it was Frank, their loyal slave, warning her that the redcoats were on the way.Perhaps it was not just a distaste for activists but what he described to an acquaintance as his ‘mild natural colourphobia’ that explained why he didn’t speak against slavery till the ...”

“... reads like the cast-list of some bizarre Antipodean soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious an advocate of anti-German ...”

“... threatening to turn even Gandhi into an also-ran. Meanwhile, he makes a cameo appearance in Michael Dobbs’s new Good-fellowe thriller, which revolves around the hunt for his next incarnation in London. The Chinese villains are as dastardly as one might wish from HarperCollins, as sinister as the Manchu embassy officials who in 1896 kidnapped the ...”

“... and prone to self-destruction. Wieners himself remembered taking the ferry to Provincetown with Frank O’Hara: ‘We stood again below deck by the hectic Atlantic cutting at our feet, speaking of Hart Crane and the last words we would have in our mouths at that moment of surrender.’ His idol was Billie Holiday, who gives the name to one of his best short ...”

“... feeling, they wept. Then, last night, the final twist occurred. The tribe fell upon her assailant, Michael Heseltine, and slew him, too.’ But the mere exclusion of Heseltine from the leadership seemed insufficient atonement for the unnatural enormity of matricide. Within the Tory tribe there was to be no healing, no reconciliation, no closure. This was a ...”

“... friend called Jane all his life. ‘I don’t think he had the faintest idea what laundry was,’ Frank Auerbach said. ‘He put it into this basket and it came back from Jane immaculately laundered.’ After he left school, his father took a piece of sculpture – a sandstone horse, almost two feet high, ‘three legs serving convincingly as four’ – that ...”

“... the final design. A good deal of what happens goes on below the surface. The settlers are neither frank nor articulate, so the forces of thought and feeling among them – liberal and good-hearted on one-side, racist and violent on the other – are delivered to us in generalised abstract by the novelist himself, and through the perceptions of Gemmy who must ...”