“... consciousness of the 1920s coincided, of course, with the arrival of the Jazz Age. Josephine Baker was the toast of Paris. After seeing her in Chocolate Dandies, the Greenwich Village poet, e.e. cummings reported ecstatically that ‘she resembled some tall, vital, incomparably fluid nightmare which crossed its eyes, warped its limbs in a purely ...”

“... old furniture of the Round Reading Room as they can. They are not making much headway. Felicity Baker has written: ‘A symbolic deadlock between the Regular Readers’ Group and the directors [of the British Library] is centred on the old Circular Catalogue, the hundreds of volumes which list acquisitions up to 1975. In one of our attempts to persuade them ...”

“... he would be unable to face the children. ‘This is real – not stuff,’ he wrote in a letter to Nancy Astor, who was trying to act as go-between. Also real not stuff was the knowledge that divorce might spell the end of his political ambitions. By the time Macmillan became prime minister divorce was no longer a barrier to high office. His cabinets contained ...”

“... character of the pair, insistent on giving her opinion on everything with pedantic accuracy (Nancy Reagan, thirty years later, couldn’t stand being constantly corrected by her). Taubman makes clear that the combination of her outspokenness and her unshakeable loyalty held her husband together through terrible times, when without her he might have ...”

“... By the time of the Paramount ‘Swoonatra’ incident he was four years married to his first wife, Nancy, with one young child (Nancy Jr) and a second (Frank Jr) just about to arrive. He dressed like other adults of the time. (His sole concession to dandyism was a lasciviously Borromean, outsize bow-tie.) His day-to-day ...”

“... but only Berenson appears more frequently as a correspondent in the selection edited by R.W.B. and Nancy Lewis in 1988. ‘I beg instant cremation for this,’ she was writing to Fullerton almost from the start; but the fact that the erotically adventurous Fullerton had already been the victim of one blackmail attempt does not seem to have made him wary about ...”