“... visited London, where I’d begun spending a part of my time, they’d come to have dinner with Claire Bloom and me. Though Bern and I ended up most evenings talking together about books and writing, we hardly ever alluded to each other’s fiction and never seriously discussed it, observing a discreet, unwritten rule of propriety that exists among ...”

“... engorged on air, ready to burst. How so very dear. Eventually Samuel, the narrator, and his wife, Claire, are forced to leave that ‘sweet daughter’, the petulant pre-teen Esther, and take to the road, packing ‘a raw stash of anti-comprehension pills, a child’s radio retrofitted as a toxicity screen, an unopened bit of gear called a Dräger Aerotest ...”

“... Grievance and 2ND Poems, seemed to mark him out as an oddity who could easily be ignored. The White Threshold in 1949 and The Nightfishing in 1955 made a conscious break with his earliest work, but just at the point at which he began to win recognition, he appeared to give up writing. Though he continued to publish in little magazines throughout the ...”

“... warmed by the Moonies’ unconditional support for him during Watergate, invited Moon to the White House, where the two men prayed together. Nixon’s fall was a grievous blow to Moon, who immediately set out on a campaign of extreme right-wing agitation to reverse what he saw as the decline into leftism inaugurated by Watergate. The Moonie ...”

“... had never seen either. All records of passing time were precious to STW, from Proust to Gilbert White’s notes on his tortoise. ‘Continuity,’ she said, ‘it is that which we cannot write down, it is that which we cannot compass, record or control ... An old teapot, used daily, can tell me more of my past than anything I recorded of it.’ Few people ...”

“... and most of all the burden of providing her with sandwiches on the days she came to work. ‘White bread, crusts trimmed, Bick’s yum-yum pickles always in a cut-glass dish between them at the table’: these lunches had become a token of order and plenitude for Maria, a symbol of grace and permanence. For Mrs Ellington, whom Maria ‘had held to be the ...”

“... someone to avoid, like Bridget Jones’s single woman found half-eaten by her Alsatian. Since Claire Messud can no longer use spinster in its neutral sense of an unmarried woman, she adopts a euphemism in this novel about a very disappointed schoolmarm without a husband or child who becomes obsessed with somebody else’s family. The refrain Nora repeats ...”

“... his sister Augusta; his wife; actresses at Drury Lane where he was a manager of the theatre; Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley’s half-sister; the chambermaid in Ostend on whom, according to Dr Polidori, Byron ‘fell like a thunderbolt’ on arriving on the Continent in April 1816; innumerable strangers of all classes at the ridotto, a regular venue for ...”

“... the germ of which was the story of an American Shelley-worshipper seeking out the eighty-year old Claire Clairmont to trick or wheedle her into handing over precious documents illuminating her youthful relations with Shelley and Byron. There has been a flurry of activity with reference to these poets in our own time: Shelley, Mary Shelley, Byron and their ...”

“... she needed to. In addition to the stories and novels she wrote poetry, and a biography of T.H. White. She also translated Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve, was a devoted correspondent, and kept a diary running to 38 volumes. More surprisingly, she was a musicologist of considerable importance, as well as a knowledgeable gardener and a resourceful cook. Since ...”

“... director of the Science Media Centre is Fiona Fox, a former LM contributor and younger sister of Claire Fox, the IoI’s head honcho. (‘Various people have brought allegations about my past involvement in politics to the attention of my current and former employers,’ FF said when I asked her about this. ‘At every stage my employers have robustly ...”

“... Katharine Hepburn’s Jo; Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 take seemed to me to lean (weepily) towards Claire Danes’s Beth; only Gerwig’s has time and space for Amy, played by Florence Pugh. Though maybe I’m overdoing it: who comes away from Little Women wanting to be anyone other than Jo?‘This is ours,’ was the drumbeat thought I had throughout the ...”

“... grazes the surface and plumbs the depth of desire. When Javo starts to sleep with a woman called Claire, he complains to Nora that ‘fucking just isn’t so much fun’: Claire fucks ‘with her eyes shut’. ‘I understood in my bones that “fun” was not what he meant, that perhaps he wished to affirm to me that ...”

“... the colour of something, it is invariably brown. Her hippie brother Nick is resplendent in a white Afghan coat. When Jones finally gets one, it’s brown, much less desirable than a white one, and anyway brown. I also ached for an Afghan coat, but like the rest of the hippie world, a ...”

“... is a 44-year-old American called Emmett, who edits medical textbooks for a living. He has a wife, Claire, an eight-year-old son, Henry, and a 14-year-old daughter, Phoebe. He is an American everyman: ‘I’ve just ridden my bicycle, gone to school, greased my ball bearings, gotten a job, gotten married, and here I am.’ He decides to get up very early every ...”