“... humourless militants, I was pleased to make the acquaintance of the constitutionalist organiser Kate Frye, who wasn’t above using her good looks to enlist male help: she shouldn’t flirt so much, she wrote in her diary, but it did get things moving and ‘in some moods, I could flirt with a broomstick.’ Robinson pays refreshing attention to the high ...”

“... poetry, reciting ‘Lycidas’, comparing the virtues of Browning, Tennyson, Hopkins, Arnold, Swift, Dunbar, Henryson, Chatterton, Chaucer and Gray. Lowell noted the value of Berryman’s hard work on Shakespeare, listening to him ‘quote with vibrance to all lengths, even prose, even late Shakespeare, to show what could be done with disrupted and mended ...”

“... helplessly, hopelessly entangled in his earthly travail, mired and clogged where he should be swift; our view of him is blurred just where it should be clearest and most vivid. Parker’s tremendous outlay on props, costumes and scenery very nearly results in distracting us altogether from the action of the drama. Melville, the great ...”

“... bewildered) Duke of Kent. We have an awkward few minutes but the day is saved by Clive Swift, whose son Joe has just won a medal at Chelsea. HRH knows about Chelsea and so brightens considerably. Meanwhile lurking by the door HMQ is due to come through is Kate O’Mara and when I next look lining up to meet Her ...”

“... lovers, he writes, may not have been real people at all. Interviewed fifty years after the fact, Kate Kingsley Skattebol, Highsmith’s closest friend at Barnard, could not, he points out, recall her mentioning (let alone dating) anyone called Virginia when they were at college, even though a woman bearing that name appears as a major pash in Highsmith’s ...”

“... authority that allowed Hardwick to produce ‘The Decline of Book Reviewing’, and to deliver the swift and slashing put-downs that make her criticism fun. (Anaïs Nin? ‘Mercilessly pretentious.’ Faulkner? ‘Historically ridiculous.’) She was supremely confident and grabbed her subjects by the throat. But some of her longer sentences are so riddled ...”

“... sentences hanging in the air; communication takes place between slow implication and swift inference: ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ The word ‘Wonderful!’ returns over and over as the best that can be said by way of a summing-up. As James aged, his reticence, or the reticence he imposed on his surrogates, grew more ‘wonderful’ indeed. With The Wings ...”

“... murk of Yerevan’s central station and into a doorway. In an instant there was light, power, a swift transaction involving tokens, a set of escalators, and at their foot, the familiar declining whine of a clean, brightly lit underground train. We got in; the carriage was full of neatly dressed Armenians who were, in spite of everything, going somewhere ...”

“... rehearsal. Ellington had never before performed ‘God Bless America’ (famously recorded by Kate Smith in 1939) and would never repeat this airing. Why did he offer it at Fargo?If you accept Ellington’s truncated ‘God Bless America’ as a delayed coda to ‘St Louis Blues’, it introduces the idea of producing multicultural medleys for regions in ...”