“... in art school in LA – the New York of Judson Church and Yvonne Rainer, of Andy Warhol and Patti Smith and Lou Reed. It was disappearing as she arrived, as cities do. She wasn’t sure whether she should be a dancer or artist or filmmaker or writer or musician; what mattered was less what kind of artist than to be one, there. Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen ...”

“... little anxiety in the younger poets, such as Robert Crawford, Liz Lochead, W.N. Herbert, Kathleen Jamie and Jackie Kay, who have learned from him. In Edwin Morgan: Inventions of Modernity, Colin Nicholson tries to account for his many-sided subject by examining him facet by facet, but the result is rather less than the sum of its (sometimes ...”

“... least mount my bike and cycle away. Sixty years since I first met him when he was a self-assured ex-paratrooper of an undergraduate at my college, his stutter used to emphasise his machine-gun wit, and already knowing everything there was to be known about films and quite definitely a man of the world.18 July. Not having a mortgage or being otherwise in hock ...”

“... years, comebacks, more wilderness years and sad endings. We might as well be talking about Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Maria Callas, Janis Joplin, Karen Carpenter or Judy Garland, and several of them get namechecked here – Callas and Holiday repeatedly. All those women artists wracked and torn, felled by life’s blows, never finding their man or peace. I ...”

“... about having to put on so much make-up and even more about the bore of taking it all off, Maggie Smith seems to enjoy transforming herself into Miss Shepherd, today showing me her grey mottled legs as if they are a newly completed landscape. She’s particularly pleased with the ulcers she has incorporated into the decorative scheme, displaying them with the ...”

“... voice always childlike in its directness. In her lifetime this prompted comparisons with Stevie Smith, which Comyns did not care for, and indeed she had little in common with Smith, the suburban celibate whose authorial self is firmly if oddly poised, while Comyns’s always seems at the mercy of events. For the reader of ...”

“... these people. They were people. I live among her and hers.In an early story called ‘On the Day E.M. Forster Died’, the middle-aged Mrs Smith is released from the great man’s influence. Sitting in the London Library, as is her habit when her three small children are at school, she has the idea for something like the ...”

“... about Bacon’s claim that his parents had ‘sold’ him to an older man, Cecil Harcourt-Smith, who took him to Berlin. But he did visit Berlin with Harcourt-Smith in the spring of 1927. He was excited by the city itself but not by German art: ‘It always had too much of a story to tell,’ he said. In Paris and ...”

“... ascetic divine’, who ‘with his lean face and compelling eyes, might well have been painted by El Greco’. Saintliness can be an extremely irritating quality, especially when it seems too easily compatible with getting one’s own way. Titmuss appears, especially in the second half of his life, to have got his own way a good deal – in his role as ...”

“... effused one settler, ‘has ever left me with the impression of being a “whiter” man.’ Ian Smith’s Selous Scouts sustained his legend. Tidrick, however, can show that this model Rugbcian lied in order to promote the cause of white settlement and empire. In 1889 he stated, with bald falsehood, in the London press, that the high plateau of Mashonaland ...”

“... gifted mechanic, someone who can précis the essence of a tale, highlight a convincing mise-en-scène. The checklist of publications – fiction, essay and epic biography – disproves that. The oddity of the Great Work is beginning to emerge: ‘No birth and no death, no beginning and no end, only perpetual pilgrimage within time.’ Everything that ...”