“... shop talk of the cluster of film pioneers – Allan Dwan, Lillian Gish, King Vidor, Hoot Gibson, Edith Head – who remember Hollywood as ‘a virtual wilderness’, when Sunset Boulevard was unpaved and pictures were called ‘galloping tintypes’. In those carefree early years, Hollywood was an Eden of enterprise: innocent, full of fun and ...”

“... hard and loose.’ Rock vocalists weren’t meant to sound like this – more Noël Coward or Edith Sitwell than the usual refried mush of American blues and soul. ‘I would do anything for you,’ a stricken Ferry sings on ‘If There Is Something’. ‘I would put roses round our door/Sit in the garden/Growing potatoes by the score.’ (This lovelorn ...”

“... latter sense is at the centre of the tradition of English romantic painting, from Blake through Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites to Sickert: certainly it was Nash’s tradition. When the war began, Nash enlisted at once, and after training and a commission he was sent to the Front, saw action in the Ypres salient, was injured in a trench accident, and ...”

“... at the back of the LRB. Vernon Lee seeks drab amanuensis. Nadia Boulanger requires tubercular page-turner of no discernible charm. Edith Sitwell seeks horsefaced girl to dribble-drabble around the scullery at Renishaw. Yes, of course: it irked me to be (yet again) Lady Terry the Incomplete – so what else is new. Not least ...”