“... certainly all the more presentable dykes in town were on hand.’On one occasion Barney took Capote to another part of Paris. ‘She wanted to show me something very unusual and extraordinary which very few people had ever seen.’ When they got to a ‘curious little neighbourhood place near the Arc de Triomphe’, Barney told her chauffeur to stop ...”

“... the camera of choice after the astronaut Walter Schirra – ‘Jolly Wally’ – bought one and took it with him on a Mercury mission to orbit the earth in 1962. The film which Eastman Kodak then made for Nasa was so thin that a roll could accommodate two hundred frames, rather than the usual 12. ‘They would loan us a Hasselblad and we would take it home ...”

“... was homosexual.’ Thirty years later, when Eliot’s prestige and influence were at their zenith, John Peter, a Canadian academic, published an article in Essays in Criticism called ‘A New Interpretation of The Waste Land’. Peter argued that the poem was at heart an elegy that might be compared to Tennyson’s In Memoriam: ‘At some previous time the ...”

“... to admire, though not all the evidence points that way. Bisexual Fork. One day Dad’s rhetoric took a startling new tack. ‘You’re right, Adam,’ he said. ‘My generation was brought up with a very simple sense of these things. When I say I’m heterosexual, I only mean that all my past experience has been with women. There’s nothing to stop me from ...”

“... cartoon, but before he could finish what sounded uncannily like the solicitor’s speech in John Osborne’s play Inadmissible Evidence, a year or so later, Doris grabbed my sleeve and we escaped down the winding wooden staircase, with the sound of his voice echoing behind us. In addition, my mother had one of her screaming fits and threatened to sue ...”

“... that she was his landlady. Having distinguished himself with a First in Greats in 1922, Lewis took the less prestigious course in English Language and Literature in one year, gaining another First. After a year or two of hand-to-mouth existence (always accompanied by Mrs Moore), in 1925 he landed a tutorial fellowship in English at Magdalen College, and ...”

“... there are about 30,000, an average of two closing every day; the French home meal a generation ago took 88 minutes to prepare, now it’s 38 minutes; the great majority of French cheeses were unpasteurised in the 1950s, now only 10 per cent are made from raw milk; French family-owned wineries and farms have been going out of business at an alarming rate, and ...”

“... surveillance helicopters take off, is closer still to Matthew Allen’s High Beach Asylum where John Clare, distracted by agricultural enclosures, was lodged. But it was the launcher site in Oxleas Wood, where locals had fought hard (and successfully) against motorway incursions, that I wanted to inspect. Leaning on his stick, Steve was waiting at North ...”

“... As Berlin excellently points out, however, there is no difficulty in seeing how the neo-Hegelians took their thesis, without any incoherence, to be one about human freedom. The claim they are advancing is that if, and only if, we actually follow the most fulfilling way of life shall we overcome the constraints and obstacles to our realisation of our full ...”

“... tones, while falling far short of withdrawing their support for Trump. Listening to Paul Ryan, John McCain, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Orrin Hatch inveigh against the evil of white supremacy, you might have thought they’d just dusted off their copies of Between the World and Me. They can hardly claim to have been shocked by Trump’s response, however. As ...”

“... it’s always good to find new species – but there is no missing the sheer delight Banks took in going about it. Banksian collecting involved tramping, climbing, shooting and fishing. He was a plant hunter as much as he was a collector. Later in life, Banks would get fat and gouty, but in his twenties he was a fit and active sportsman. He also ...”

“... none.Look again at Paradise with the Bouts alongside it. One thing is clear. Whoever it was first took possession of Bosch’s picture – whether they signed a contract or bought it from a dealer – must have known perfectly well what they were paying for. Brilliant improvisation on an old theme. Free, subtle, suggestive variation. Maybe the fantasia ...”

“... me over with pride, as if I were their successful creation.When Petrushevskaya was nine her mother took her back to Moscow. Valentina worked, but the family continued to live in immense poverty, and Petrushevskaya continued to be moved around, from underneath her uncle’s kitchen table to an orphanage, then to a children’s sanatorium. In the sanatorium, at ...”

“... the United States, teaching poetry at various universities and especially at Harvard; in 1974 she took an apartment in Boston. She died in the winter of 1979. So far as appearances go, her life was not dramatic. But one never knows about drama. There was, however, one piece of evidence which suggested drama. In 1970 Robert Lowell published ‘Four Poems for ...”

“... was 11, leaving the family $8 after funeral expenses had been paid. Frost’s mother, Isabelle, took Robert and his sister east from San Francisco to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where they lived initially with her parents-in-law before Isabelle tried – with mixed results – to hold down a job as a teacher. Frost was many things before he was a poet; by the ...”