“... and Linda Simon (1998). There are also fine portraits in Jean Strouse’s biography of Alice James (1980) and in Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club (2001). No lack of attention, then, but Richardson’s book is very welcome, in part because of his refusal to stop worrying about his subject, and his ability finally to let his enthusiasm overcome his ...”

“... reassured that it was only ‘Mr Gisbourne’s bonfire’. An hour later, the theatre manageress, Alice Rainbow, was finally warned that the building was on fire. She ran through the theatre opening all the doors and windows in the misguided hope that this would curb it. By early afternoon, as Sally Beauman records in her history of the Royal Shakespeare ...”

“... seventy and eighty engagements. And he wrote as many letters to Hale. Like Henry James and Henry Adams, Eliot returned after a long spell in Europe and felt – hauntedly – that coming back was the real rite of passage. In 1919 he had reviewed Adams’s autobiography, seeing him as fair game for epigrammatic malice on ...”

“... Laughlin, founder and editor of New Directions (or Nude Erections as Pound liked to call it); to Alice Corbin Henderson of Poetry; to Scofield Thayer and James Sibley Watson of the Dial; to Margaret Anderson of the Little Review. Two hefty books collected his courtship letters to Dorothy Shakespear, and those written to her some thirty years later from the ...”

“... specified for Aboriginal participation. The first Aboriginal television station, Imparja, based in Alice Springs, is beginning its broadcasts with the help of bicentennial money. A successful black artist, Jimmy Pike, was commissioned to do the ABA’s official poster. It shows the white man’s ship arriving – from the viewpoint of the shore. Although ...”

“... if not hyperventilate, at some of the A-list names cropping up regularly in All We Know: Maude Adams (the first Peter Pan); the Russian film star Alla Nazimova (a teetering Salomé in the ultra-campy cinematic 1923 version of Wilde’s play); Isadora Duncan, the bisexual modern dancer; the interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe and her Broadway-producer lover ...”

“... such attention. Nothing much, for example, came of the sinking of the paddle steamer Princess Alice during a ‘moonlight trip’ down the Thames. Struck by a collier on 3 September 1878, she sank within minutes, taking 650 passengers down with her. Those who weren’t trapped inside did not so much drown as succumb to sewage, millions of gallons of which ...”