“... acts of self-limitation, they were both victims of the kind of malice that can be illustrated by Frank O’Connor’s description of Mansfield as ‘the brassy little shop-girl of literature’, or by Virginia Woolf’s complaint that she ‘stank like a civet cat’ – the latter (if it requires translation) recording simply that the Woolf nose judged the ...”

“... his constant personal and financial crises, ending with the murder of his wife Sharon Tate by Charles Manson and Polanski’s imprisonment for ‘raping’ a juvenile in California, have obscured the aspect of him which really matters: that he is the most consistently brilliant of all the film-makers who have emerged from post-war Poland. Andrzej Wajda is ...”

“... a powerpacked masthead! Managing editor: Alfred Perles; society editor: Anais Nin; sports editor: Charles Nordon (aka Lawrence Durrell); butter news editor: Walter Lowenfels; department of metaphysics and metapsychosis: Michael Fraenkel; fashion editor: Earl of Selvage (aka Henry Miller); and Lawrence Durrell and William Saroyan as the literary editors. As ...”

“... magazine continued to come out, albeit with diminishing frequency, until 1969. William Burroughs, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn and Barbara Guest all appeared in its pages. Producing the Floating Bear was an ‘endless rhythm of editing, typing, proofing, printing, collating, stapling, labelling and mailing’, but di Prima understood the importance ...”

“... a pariah. The mores of late Georgian England, sceptical and sometimes callous, seem refreshingly frank. ‘I always liked very old people when they were clean and appeared respectable’ is something Wilson can say without blinking. Not only was there less hypocrisy about sex and marriage than there would be twenty years later, there was no sentimentality ...”

“... lacking in ‘industry and perseverance’ in business matters, to borrow from his description of Frank Clare, the worthless young love interest in No Name, and began to write and publish fiction. At 22, as his father was dying, he was sent to read law at Lincoln’s Inn; he spent his time there working on his second novel manuscript. On his father’s death ...”

“... its planning has focused on London and its environs, with schemes for Paternoster Square (Prince Charles helped to dash this one), Greenwich Peninsula, Bankside, Wembley and the Lower Lea Valley (including the Olympics master plan); and the same is true of its dock projects, which have included the Royal Albert Docks, Silvertown Docks and Convoys Wharf. Not ...”

“... to suppose that, lulled by the calm and intelligence of their interlocutor, they were more frank than is usually the case when dealing with the media. The former Liberal leader and recent EU commissioner, Frits Bolkestein, for example, is quoted as saying: ‘One must never underestimate the degree of hatred that Dutch people feel for Moroccan and ...”

“... characters – Aaron Burr and the Emperor Julian – as well as in his satires. In Burr, Charles Schuyler, a character invented by Vidal to be this vice president’s biographer, says his subject is ‘a man of perfect charm and fascination. A monster, in short.’ Not unlike the novel’s author. ‘I suspect Cromwell was right,’ Vice President ...”

“... projects, this excessively long biography offers both ugly revelations and moving insights. Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, the son of Swiss parents, a father who enamelled watchcases and a piano teacher mother, Le Corbusier was a man of apparently absolute precision in everything he did, from his obsessive timekeeping to the organisation of his own ...”

“... Glasgow’s most famous building and possibly the greatest creation of its principal designer, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, elicited tributes and sympathy from around the world. Le Monde called it ‘a masterpiece’, ‘one of the most emblematic buildings of the emerging 20th century’. The fire was news in Cuba and Argentina. Brad Pitt, a longtime ...”

“... been to give to all who read and enjoy her novels another book by Barbara Pym.’ There are, as Charles Lamb pointed out, books which are not books, biblia abiblia. Certainly A Very Private Eye is a long way from being a substitute for a Barbara Pym novel. Even its second or post-1950 half, where we come at last nearer to hearing something recognisable as ...”

“... the editor managed to suppress it (‘the veriest twaddle’). This snapshot – one of many in Charles Williams’s biography – reveals two factors in Beaverbrook’s success. The first is that posh English society was no match for him. He was ‘vulgar’, but there was a charm in his self-promotion which made languid ladies and gentlemen want to be on ...”

“... of happy minorities into a more perfect whole.’ That The Golden Age takes several swipes at Frank Capra should come as no surprise. In the volumes written before Vidal had conceived the sequence as a whole, the demands of history and imagination are for the most part equally addressed. Though the central fictional character of Burr, the narrator, ...”

“... Loyola’s pastoral care for Margaret of Austria, illegitimate daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who had the misfortune to be married to one of the loutish grandsons of Pope Paul III. Loyola’s concern for Margaret in her misery saved her marriage, and indeed the surviving son after the marriage reconciliation was destined to be the ...”