“... of piano playing on this ordinary girl: ‘disjoined from her music-stool, [she] was only a young lady with a quantity of dark hair and a very pretty, pale, undeveloped face.’ As yet she doesn’t live as she plays, but Mr Beebe is, of course, prescient. Much later in his life, Forster, speculating whimsically about the future of some of his ...”

“... blazer. He seemed to like that, the stripes.’ John C. Spahr was born on 9 January 1963 at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden, New Jersey. His mother, Eileen, is the eldest of her Irish family, the Kellys, who came to Boston from Ireland before the Second World War. Eileen married Ronald Charles Spahr of Philadelphia, the son of German immigrants, and ...”

“... various members of a large and famous Bloomsbury family, children and grandchildren of the old lady to whom the house belonged, had settled down in deckchairs under the window where I was trying to write. Some of them had been swimming in the sea, some reading, one had been writing in pencil in a large notebook, and now they had gathered, with bottles of ...”

“... woman who sent in some sonnets that were published in the magazine with the title: ‘From the Fat Lady of the Sonnets’. The pained dentist who thought he was Dante al dente complained bitterly. And not only complained, but cried and prayed (he was a Catholic convert) and called us chartered murderers who assassinated writers as if they were so many ...”

“... is afterwards invested in smooth inheritance and cultivation of public goodwill, ‘but – as Lady Macbeth’s hands remind us – the founding act can never be completely expunged.’ Still, he continues imperturbably, ‘the legitimacy of power is not necessarily adversely affected by the fact that the public appears only afterwards – so long as it ...”

“... it was with the aid of a walker. But she came across more as a wounded soldier than a stricken old lady. When I went over the recording of our interview I noticed how full and precise her stories of her life were before her complex of conditions and how, as the narrative shifted to the last couple of years, it was her daughter who took over the role of ...”