“... throughout his life. Involving himself with the New Deal spirit of the Federal Theatre Project, he took the Negro People’s Theatre job for $50 a week and was sneered at by critics for his black Macbeth. When money was short, he personally subsidised his FTP Doctor Faustus: not the first time, nor by a long way the last, that he used his own money to keep a ...”

“... music (his characters have a particular taste for Mahler and for the Elizabethan composer John Dowland). In 1947 the awkward young man with literary ambitions moved into a flat with other young littérateurs, including the future avant-garde poets Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. He also took a job in a record ...”

“... This became all too clear during the Czechoslovak crisis of 1968. At the outset, Brezhnev took a fatherly liking to Alexander Dubček, the new party leader in Prague. ‘It is speculation,’ Schattenberg writes, ‘but he clearly saw in him a Czech [sic] version of himself: a young, pleasant man who was replacing an unpopular party leader ...”

“... shooting The Lady in the Van. This is the story of Miss Mary Shepherd, the elderly eccentric who took up residence in my garden in 1974, living there in a van until her death 15 years later. Maggie Smith played Miss Shepherd on the stage in 1999 and all being well will star in the film with Nicholas Hytner directing. To date I’ve written two drafts of the ...”

“... of his campaign to lift the oppression of an empire without reliance on cruelty or revenge, he took care to add that non-violent resistance was often itself a case of the lesser evil. Some of its acts of willing self-sacrifice called for the sacrifice of unasked persons elsewhere: ‘Gandhi’s boycott of British cotton results in the undernourishment of ...”

“... he wanted someone to understand the Monster Plot – someone like David Blee, for example, who took over as chief of the Soviet Bloc Division in the CIA’s clandestine wing in 1971 – Angleton would schedule time for ‘the briefing’. He didn’t tell Blee what it was all about in twenty minutes: he walked him through it, one bit at a time, in a ...”

“... of branches across the country were targeted by protesters on the same day. In Tottenham, Ruby took the microphone. ‘My landlord …’ she said. ‘This is a man who took the Hippocratic oath, but who now rakes it in by stacking up vulnerable humans in a home riddled with damp. I am so angry. I want to know when we ...”

“... Ann Trow Sommers moved to Chatham Street, a neighbourhood of cheap lodging houses and saloons, and took in laundry and mending work. She discovered that laundresses and seamstresses in America were no better paid than they had been in Painswick. The average seamstress in New York earned just $1.12 a week, even lower than factory work.A pill compounder called ...”

“... House (where I do not pee). It’s the home of the Lascelles family, an ancestor of which, John Lascelles, blew the gaffe on Catherine Howard, the king’s fifth wife, but was later culled himself in the purge of evangelicals during that dreadful monarch’s last years. I watch two of the now well-established red kites tumbling about the sky above the ...”

“... in his second marriage (his first wife died of consumption shortly after their wedding), he took on mistresses, while remaining on affectionate terms with the second wife, from whom he mostly lived apart. When confronted with problems outside his control, he concentrated on soluble problems. When tricked or cheated, he neither brooded nor held ...”

“... to Elizabeth Bishop because they reveal the irrepressible individual – the nonconformist who took tango lessons; the baseball enthusiast; the eccentric who, however much she flattened her headgear, nevertheless possessed and wore ‘the Holbein/Erasmus-type hat, and later the famous tricorn’; the zany who learned to drive at a dangerously advanced age ...”

“... is that the minorities were not always on bad terms with the Vietnamese people, but repeatedly took part with them in risings against oppressive governments – as subject tribes in the Asian border-lands sometimes did with Russian peasant rebels – and also in barring the way to outsiders. To all this collective character-building must be added the harsh ...”

“... tribes of an expanding American subculture, and gave them a name and a voice. The first reading took place at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on 7 October 1955. Michael McClure who also read that night along with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia, describes the poem’s impact in Scratching the Beat Surface (1982): I hadn’t seen Allen in a ...”

“... jumped straight on a train to Nashville, there to meet with her friends-and-collaborators-to-be. John Crowe Ransom, then a key member of the Fugitive group, tells the story of what happened next. Undoubtedly we were rather absurd in the way we received Laura at Nashville – prim, formidable and stiff. What she came for was human companionship of the most ...”

“... for questions. The tale of Hylas, for instance, is one of the better-known episodes, thanks to John William Waterhouse’s painting with its loved-up, spaced-out nymphs. Casually, Apollonius drops a bombshell: Hercules had adopted the boy, he says, after killing his father. He alludes to some dispute over an ox, but has no time to explain: ‘these tales ...”