“... chain-reaction of theatricality, for he is noisily succeeded by Gower Champion, Coco Chanel, Carol Channing, ‘Chips’ Channon (by no means out of place), and Charlie Chaplin. All the Coopers are there: Lady Diana, Duff, Gladys, Gary and Tommy. There are Douglases, from Lord Alfred to Mr and Mrs Kirk; here are the Nicholses, Beverley and Mike; and you ...”

“... annexed Yeats but overlaid the southern edge of Ireland with a blown-up inset of the Lake District. The Longman’s decision to mark Gaelic-speaking areas on a map of the British Isles announces its devolutionary agenda as clearly as the new Norton’s move to balance its traditional map of London by another of the Empire honours its growing ...”

“... years covered by these letters, Force of Circumstance (as translated by Richard Howard), and in Carol Cosman’s version of America Day by Day. The difference between Beloved Chicago Man and The Mandarins is that Beauvoir could speak to Algren as she could to no one else. Anyone reading these extraordinary communications will urgently want the answers to ...”

“... films carefully edited to obscure the fact that it is not as complete as it seems to be.King Carol II, the Great and the Good, Father of Culture, Father of his People, is also busy organising a system of defence to match his pledge that ‘not one foot of Romanian territory shall pass into the hands of our enemies.’ He has been touring the ...”

“... spawned such mayhem. Five Points was built over the soupy landfill that had once been a polluted lake, and Charles Dickens observed during the 1840s that ‘all that is loathsome, drooping and decayed is here.’ The mysterious name merely denoted the intersection of Baxter, Worth and Park Streets, now buried beneath the city courts. The Points have had many ...”

“... wasted life. Indeed, in a celebrated review of the book in the New York Times Book Review, Joyce Carol Oates linked it with a genre she named ‘pathography’, whose ‘motifs are dysfunction and disaster, illnesses and pratfalls, failed marriages and failed careers, alcoholism and breakdowns and outrageous conduct. Its scenes are sensational, wallowing in ...”

“... a movie from 1943, So Proudly We Hail!, in which Claudette Colbert, Paulette Goddard and Veronica Lake played nurses on Corregidor. That blithe make-believe inspired Furey in the late 1960s to enlist as a nurse. She was trained and idealistic and brave, which meant learning to ‘swallow your own fear’ when artillery fire came down on her field ...”

“... minister), the French newspaper editor Alexandre Dujarier, Marius Petipa (the creator of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker), the Earl of Malmesbury, the Count of Schleissen, Lord Brougham (once described as ‘the ugliest man of the present century next to Liston and Lord Carlyle’), Jung Bahadur (the Nepalese ambassador to London), Savile Morton (a ...”

“... when he was a conscript sitting out the war as a company clerk at an army base in the Great Salt Lake Desert, ‘a ghastly place … we kept ourselves sloshed on tequila, which wasn’t rationed.’ His father was a newspaperman, a reporter then an editor; his mother was a housewife who adored her precocious son. Gorey was reading by the age of three and at ...”

“... a much later letter (23 October 1983) to the painter Barrie Cooke, where he describes fishing on Lake Victoria with his son, Nicholas:Nick & I went across one night – a biggish sea, a very big load of fish, sailing into the most incredible display of lightning I ever saw. Truly like a thunderstorm on an electrified planet in a space fiction film. We got ...”

“... change wore out like a prescription.And there’s more to it than just window viewsAnd living by a lake. I’m past such help –Unless Len took the notion, which he won’t,And I won’t ask him – it’s not sure enough.I s’pose I’ve got to go the road I’m going:Other folks have to, and why shouldn’t I?I almost think if I could do like you,Drop ...”