“... he’d first seen Iolanthe in 1907. ‘It’s impossible to believe that a lord chancellor in love with a fairy can be anything but ridiculous,’ he told Leonard Woolf; ‘but one goes, and when the moment comes, it’s simply great … I should like to go every night, for the comedy and wit is as enthralling as the tragedy.’ Strachey wasn’t far ...”

“... of Mr Natural; Home Grown Funnies (in which the uptight White Man is kidnapped by and falls in love with a female Bigfoot); the even more absurdly kinky Big Ass Comics; Your Hytone Comix, which features an anthropomorphic toilet; and the classic XYZ Comics (including, among other things, ‘The Many Faces of R. Crumb’ and an eight-page exercise called ...”

“... mood in this early uncertain period of the war. He was being turned into a ‘poster-poet’, Harold Monro, the editor of Poetry Review, wrote, but ‘“He did his duty? Will you do yours?” is hardly the moral to be drawn.’ Maybe not, but it was handy for the government all the same. Soon enough, the myth of the heroic soldier-poet was joined by that ...”

“... was of great interest to me. I am not a linguist, I am not a scholar by nature or inclination; I love reading and writing and practising psychoanalysis but I have never done anything that looks like what people call research. I have also always admired the Strachey translation, and like many people really did think of it as the standard edition. Like the ...”

“... for another woman, during a difficult pregnancy in which mother and child seemed doomed; her love affair with the feminist Bryher was fraught; writing set up its own strains: but Freud already knew, amid this welter of anxieties, what really worried the patient. Had he not just shown, in the lecture on ‘Femininity’ (1933), that women are driven by a ...”

“... to hounds by tube, dressed in full hunting pink, amid somewhat bemused workmen. Though he shared a love of poetry with Powell, Macleod was appalled at the idea of early rising, let alone hunting – his life was one of late nights, pretty women, and heavy smoking and drinking over the card table. Later on, boring government meetings would be spent writing ...”

“... never strident. What she does seem, on this evidence, is a bit unreal. Continually and chastely in love with the one man while he and all around her are successively consumed by more or less ephemeral passions, she is starring in a play by Shaw while everybody else is in a play by Schnitzler. The libidinous cyclone of which she has perennially functioned as ...”

“... and ‘California girls turned Muslim, born anew, in hijab and long skirt’. He fell in love with Samori’s mother, a young woman from Chicago, and befriended a handsome doctor’s son called Prince Jones, whose untimely death at the hands of the police functions as the moral fulcrum of the book. Coates then writes of his early years of struggle as ...”

“... alter egos, Susie and Antonia, and the letters reveal the existence of a protracted infatuation or love affair with a young man called Charles Thurstan Edward-Collins (the possessor of the ‘grey feminine eyes’). Louis returned to Marlborough to visit after he left for Oxford. (‘I told Charles I wasn’t coming to M.C. any more but I expect I shall. The ...”

“... transformed his life. His journals of the time are the record of a passionate cross-Channel love affair with the Parisian avant garde (and varyingly intellectual fringe members of both sexes on both sides of the Channel). He spent his most creative decade commuting between bohemian Surrealist Paris, dominated by its belligerent pontiff, André ...”

“... getting the boy to change his name, once he becomes a poet, to Hart (her maiden name) Crane, from Harold Hart Crane, giving him a stage-name, so to speak, that is the starkest combination of his parents. And father as capitalist – creator of ‘the largest maple syrup business of its kind in the world’, inventor of the Lifesaver, and a successful and then ...”

“... in the Army have become so devoted to their President. Walt Whitman, with his idea of ‘adhesive love’, might have offered an explanation: that bearded nurse makes a brief appearance in the novel, and we half-expect him to eulogise the President, but that would be too embarrassing. Lincoln’s grandeur and awesomeness must, for Vidal, be presented more ...”

“... silent.’ ‘The fear of people’ had been ‘instilled’ in her, as had a desperate need for love. She was impulsively generous, sympathetic to any suffering in people or animals, but desperately over-sensitive to criticism or rebuff. She changed her mind and her feelings about people violently and often and at such moments she was not silent, often in ...”

“... postwar childhood, and the 1960s bring out the scold in him. Cabinet ministers were disgraced for love, thugs robbed a mail-train and were hailed as heroes, unmasked traitors were admired for their complex personalities, the harlot’s cry from mews to mews had the exultant confidence of Callas singing ‘Casta diva’ and the Beatles mouthed and mimed to ...”

“... Frank Ocean, who astonished the luridly heterosexual R’n’B scene last year by recording love songs addressed to his boyfriend. But what if she’d just prefer to be one of the characters in Made in Chelsea? Heti, who turned 36 on Christmas Day, has said that one of the starting points of the novel (others were Warhol and Werner Herzog and ...”