“... London, during the Second World War, she was evacuated to her grandparents’ in Chorley Wood, ‘a safe place for a Jewish child in 1940s Europe’. After the war, her father never came back. The divorce was ‘loud’. Neither parent wanted Barbara and her younger sister, Ruth, so they were made wards of court. Her father later took his own ...”

“... upon a time it was winter & snowed down from the sky and a queen sat at a window of ebony wood & sewed.’ The equivalent in the first printed version is: ‘Once upon a time it was the middle of winter and the snowflakes fell like feathers from the sky. A beautiful queen sat and sewed at a window that had a frame made of black ebony.’Myths rapidly ...”

“... Henry Horne says something offensive to a young lady named Rita when her brother Charles is by to protect her. Can you hear the two different tones in which she says their respective names, “Henry Horne! Charles!” I can hear it better than I can say it.’ On other occasions, Frost makes his point by ...”

“... of the Hudson. In New York, Oppen met Louis Zukofsky, who had already been published by Pound, and Charles Reznikoff, an attorney at work on a law encyclopedia. The three poets, grown uneasy with Imagism and keen to distinguish themselves, conceived a publishing venture which was very much in the Oppens’ mind when they took off for Europe in 1929. They ...”

“... in one of Netflix’s numberless true crime productions (viz, a reconstructed FBI interview with Charles Manson, peddling his ‘blame it on the Beatles’ spiel); a ‘previously unseen’ Beatles-at-home photo from 1963; a ‘previously unseen’ Beatles photo at Shea Stadium from 1965; a hip young mixadelic band citing ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ as ...”

“... tears. The first was when he shot a heron which had been attacking the fish in the moat at Salt-wood Castle. The second was on the occasion of a ‘Bloomsbury evening at Saltwood. We entertained the “Friends of Charleston”.’ Clark stuffed the Garden House with Bloomsbury ‘items’ and in the Great Library there was a performance by Eileen Atkins of ...”

“... few notches in an old man’s teeth to positing the existence of pathological cult killers of the Charles Manson variety, to use the Turners’ own analogy (in interviews, Christy Turner has also drawn comparisons with Hitler, Genghis Khan and Stalin), who first terrorised and then destroyed Anasazi society, clearly requires a huge imaginative leap. Turner ...”

“... wore in The Misfits. He frames them and hangs them up in his apartment. He gets the pleasure of Charles I pacing a banqueting hall replete with Van Dycks. Hilfiger gets to feel he has captured the thing that is truly seen to capture his time. The spirit of the age is a bundle of famous rags. Going, going. Gone. But what of poor Marilyn herself? What is ...”

“... working mothers, female professionals, ‘family values’. The respectful attention given to Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve shows that they are anything but discredited among the so-called cultural élite. A spirited storyteller, May has uncovered a wealth of unfamiliar lore. We learn of black women slaves who refused to be ‘bred’ by their ...”

“... was arrested for participating in the Paris Commune, and in jail became friends with a musician, Charles de Sivry, whose mother – Antoinette-Flore Mauté – was a talented pianist and teacher who claimed to have been a pupil of Chopin’s (as it happened, she was also Verlaine’s mother-in-law). It was Madame Mauté who recognised Debussy’s exceptional ...”

“... speaker, is the masterpiece of such skewed vision: the ‘dreadful hollow behind the little wood’ with which it begins is the grandfather of all those marvellous Audenesque landscapes of ‘silted harbours, derelict works,/The strangled orchard or the silent comb’; and, just like the Audenesque, the Tennysonian manner created an imaginative world ...”

“... for passing information that John Terry’s mother had been cautioned for shoplifting, and Ronnie Wood for assaulting his girlfriend; and Tracy Bell, a pharmacy assistant at Sandhurst, who had sold five stories about Princes William and Harry in 2005 and 2006 for around £1000. The arrests of journalists began on 4 November 2011 with Jamie Pyatt, a prolific ...”

“... consort, Edith Swan-Neck, mother of his children. This piece, by the Anglo-German sculptor Charles Augustus William Wilke, was banished from the grounds of Hastings Museum to a corner of the West Marina Gardens in St Leonards-on-Sea adequate to its transcendent obscurity. The decaying low-baroque tableau of conjugal tenderness, features eaten away by ...”

“... with cardboard and resoled them with cork or rope, made their own hats out of old newspapers and wood shavings, unravelled empty grain sacks so as to knit the scratchy yarn into underwear and socks, and stitched together new dresses from the good bits of worn-out ones. Eventually, they remade the uniforms of their slain husbands and sons into clothes for ...”

“... including (especially) the Kitchen Sink, jokes nipped from Oscar Wilde, Alan Bennett and Victoria Wood. He loved to do versions of his favourite songs by Twinkle and Cilla Black and even by brand new bands (like the Manchester outfit James) who barely had any fans yet. He so yearned to be his favourite movie star that he wrote a book called James Dean Is Not ...”