“... of future troubles. A baby brother died when she was six, and within the year another brother, Richard, died from scarlet fever. As Susannah Clapp put it in her review of Fitzgerald’s biography (LRB, 20 December 1984), Mew liked to play the child, but child’s play was always a peculiarly fraught affair. In one poem she addresses Sorrow and remembers ...”

“... was I who killed you, I, who saw you mute and anxious, but could not touch you through the wall of glass. I, so stupid, so blind, so incredibly selfish and cruel!’ His inability to sustain a settled union with someone else is naturally matched with his schizophrenic failure to achieve any unity within himself. He is doubled up in the pain of ...”

“... the only regular service offered here. Ignoring the ancient injunction bidding them from the wall to ‘Commit no nuisance,’ these time-honoured figures stage a performance of their own. They hurl insults at the concertgoers, begging money from them obscenely, and urinating over their smart cars. My sleeve was taken by a man who dragged me into the ...”

“... I wanted. Then, as an experiment I tried some yellow stain on a small patch and this turned the wall a vibrant green, too strong I’m sure for many people but for me ideal, so that’s how I did the whole room. The study next door I did differently using water-based stains and as the walls here were lime plaster too I painted them in a mixture of umber and ...”

“... Dealer. The man who started this frivolous auction was William Safire, former speechwriter to Richard Nixon and now columnist for the New York Times. He it was who, during the dismal days of the Jimmy Carter Presidency, came up with ‘Koreagate’, ‘Peanutgate’, ‘Billygate’ and – his own favourite, concerning some fiddle of government expenses ...”

“... Beschloss demonstrated that Kennedy had been privately relieved by the building of the Berlin Wall, had publicly almost refrained from commenting on it, and had waited until two years after it was safely built before using it as a sound-stage for his Ich bin grand-standing. Hersh adds some more detail here, showing that Berlin was always subordinate to ...”

“... politely inquired: ‘Do you wish to pass me on the left or on the right?’ The incident, which Richard Boston recounts in his biographical memoir of Lancaster, captures something essential about a man who, as a cartoonist and writer excelled in capturing types, human and architectural, yet himself remained hard to typify. Georgian (Town) Pillar to ...”

“... field with its drystane dyke made from the detritus of the last Ice Age. On the other side of this wall was the Quarry Wood, a long-overgrown granite works which gives Nan Shepherd’s first novel its title. My father once told me that the hardcore base of our driveway was made from the Quarry Wood wall. Sure enough, another ...”

“... even slightly frowned on). The pigeons were kept in wooden Tate and Lyle sugar boxes nailed to the wall. Mr Osman’s grandfather built a loft in the backyard. He had great affection for the creatures, and he would write articles about them, arguing for their nobility and beauty. He wanted to make them respectable. He founded the federation of pigeon clubs; he ...”

“... between 1918 and 1925, when they married, has been edited by a niece and a nephew, Polly Hill and Richard Keynes, who rightly believe that it will be ‘of value and interest and will not offend their ghosts’. In an excellent introduction they admit that Lydia, in the early stages, must have worn herself out in flattering Maynard. She had abandoned her ...”

“... In 1843, the artist Richard Dadd murdered his father and was put away in Bethlem Hospital, Britain’s oldest lunatic asylum; his portrait of the alienist Sir Alexander Morison stares from the cover of Masters of Bedlam, gauntly silhouetted against a mottled sky. He seems to be looking at something he finds hard to bear ...”

“... He wasn’t poor: in fact, he was very rich, the son of Charles Merrill, founder of the biggest Wall Street brokerage firm, Merrill Lynch. He wasn’t tormented – at least he didn’t have mental breakdowns or attempt suicide. He drank a lot but not famously and he eventually joined AA without becoming sanctimonious or losing his talent; some of his best ...”

“... darkness’ homeland? Yet Harris’s ‘thank you’ is not just a perversity. It finds an echo in Richard Wright’s question: ‘What does an African facing an African American see?’ It also finds an echo in Manthia Diawara’s answer: I see Toni Cade Bambara, I see Kamau Brathwaite, I see James Baldwin, I see Bob Marley, I see James Brown, I see ...”

“... of the earliest letters, written when Gabriel was seven, records his ‘reading Shakespeare’s Richard the 3rd for my amusement . . . I, Maria, and William know several scenes by heart. I have bought a picture of Richard and Richmond fighting, and I gilded it after which I cut it out with no white.’ This self-assured ...”

“... The slogan was: ‘If you paid full price, you didn’t buy it at Crown.’ Hunter’s went to the wall. Customer loyalty, built up over decades, crumbled in months. Readers always think books overpriced – which they aren’t – and can rarely resist the opportunity to buy two for the price of one. Crown was hugely successful in its heyday. It was the first ...”