“... its way, albeit briefly, into the American best-seller lists, along with all those diets, cats and Barbara Cartland. What is more, this startling success has been accompanied by a sustained chorus of outraged disapproval from practically every US critic who is actually qualified to pass expert judgment on its contents. One may simple-mindedly attribute these ...”

“... chokehold; Michael Brown, an 18-year-old shot dead by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri; Walter Scott, a 50-year-old father of four in North Charleston, South Carolina, who was Tasered and then killed by a police officer who had stopped him for a nonfunctioning brake light; and now Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African-American in ...”

“... John Wieners​ once told his nephew he had met the Virgin Mary. ‘Did she say anything to you?’ Walter asked. ‘No,’ John said, ‘she doesn’t know how to speak.’ He paused. ‘But she’s learning.’ Wieners was born to a working-class family outside Boston in 1934, educated by Jesuits, and spent formative periods of his youth in New York, San Francisco and Black Mountain, North Carolina ...”

“... In September​ 1931, Barbara Hepworth invited Ben Nicholson to Happisburgh on the Norfolk coast. Both artists were married: Hepworth to the sculptor Jack Skeaping, whom she had met while on a scholarship in Rome, and Nicholson to the painter Winifred, who stayed behind at their farmhouse in Cumbria to look after their two small children and new baby ...”

“... On a spring day in 1940 Walter Benjamin gathered together the thousands of pages comprising his work of the last decade and carried them to his favourite place in Paris, the Bibliothèque nationale. When he got there he gave them to Georges Bataille, a head librarian there, for safekeeping. Hours before the German army entered Paris with an order to arrest him, Benjamin left the city with ‘nothing but a gas mask and my toiletries ...”

“... practising the articulation of a very real gratitude. It would have been well understood by Walter Scott: Some things of the black dog hanging about me but I will shake him off. I generally affect good spirits in company of my family whether I am enjoying them or not. It is too severe to sadden the harmless mirth of others by suffering your causeless ...”

“... peacefully sails out to sea, leaving the city in its own quiet self-consuming hellishness. Sir Walter goes on for ever reading his own life in the Baronetage; William Walter Elliot is for ever defined as bad by the simple statement that too many people like him – he lives as social image. Like Henry James’s Madame ...”

“... by several of its members, including Nina Searl, Ella Sharpe, Susan Isaacs, Donald Winnicott and Barbara Low). Ernest Jones, the President and later Freud’s biographer, was enthusiastic (‘absolutely heart-and-soul whole-hogging pro-Melanie’, according to James Strachey). In July 1925 Klein visited London to give a course of lectures on child ...”

“... servants, as well as a carpenter, several gardeners, a chauffeur called Collins who, according to Barbara [one of the children], had been brought up on a farm and ‘was far more used to animals and never understood the workings of a car’, and a very old man, the chauffeur’s father, whose sole job was to mow the lawns with a horse-drawn mowing ...”

“... Nochlin called her a ‘Rococo subversive’. It might have seemed like a joke, but she meant it. Barbara Bloemink’s new biography continues in Nochlin’s provocative spirit. According to Bloemink, Stettheimer was a social documentarian whose work looks wryly at class, gender, religion and race in early 20th-century America. She makes a compelling ...”

“... Yet she was a far greater figure than Ellen Wilkinson, Nancy Astor, Margaret Bondfield or Barbara Castle. Her neglect shows how important it is to have members of your party or faction evoking your name as part of their tradition. Perhaps the greatest recent example of what this can do for popular memory is Aneurin Bevan, whose myth reflected mainly ...”

“... broody, sombre Stoicism of Two Lives and a Dream is meticulously rendered in the translation by Walter Kaiser and the author. The jingling phrase ‘among his host of ghosts’ for dans la troupe de ses fantômes is the one thing that may cause a raised eyebrow or two, but even this presumably bears the stamp of Yourcenar’s authority. Marguerite Yourcenar ...”

“... should regard as the received malice. Although an admirer, Brady remains a touch less devoted than Barbara Leaming in her 1986 biography, based as it was on long personal sessions with Welles. Brady never met Welles. They communicated by phone and letter, and so important and detailed – important if only because detailed – a study would have benefited from ...”

“... determination to create a political dynasty through expert manipulation of money and mass media. Barbara Perry’s Rose Kennedy faces the trickier task of reconstructing the conjugal partner in that enterprise, whose life often seems little more than an endless round of state dinners and high-class shopping. In the end, Perry does as well as any biographer ...”

“... lead to such a reductio ad absurdum as I am Mary Shelley, a book published in 1977, whose author Barbara Lynne Devlin claims to be her reincarnation and, with the help of an obliging medium, revisits Mary’s past, informing the inquisitive readers that (yes) she did – though only once – go to bed with Byron and it was predictably wonderful (‘holding ...”