“... The Gawain poet’s language shows much less of the French influence that was the legacy of the Norman Conquest. Instead there are northerly inflections, with outlandish spellings and flickers of Norse strangeness.We can splice these tells with a clutch of references to actual places in Gawain. While the locations described in Pearl, Patience and Cleanness ...”

“... to Lyndon Johnson, explaining why he wouldn’t be turning up for some cultural occasion at the White House. He also played his part, recorded for admiring posterity by Norman Mailer, in the March on Washington, and was active in other anti-war demonstrations. He exerted himself for Eugene McCarthy in his presidential ...”

“... revoices this as I seek, in this captivity To pierce the veils that darklin ‘fa’ – See white clints slidin’ to the sea, And hear the horns o’ Elfland blaw. What we have now is a verse produced by Blok, his English translators, MacDiarmid and Tennyson. MacDiarmid’s Scots language is generally synthetic because it brings different dialects ...”

“... In Cold Blood, which was the inspiration for more complex and ambitious non-fiction novels by Norman Mailer (The Executioner’s Song) and Don DeLillo (Libra). In the massive, magisterial The Best American Short Stories of the Century edited by John Updike, Flannery O’Connor is included with one of her much anthologised stories, ‘Greenleaf’, while ...”

“... the cover of Business Week. In the same year she opened THP headquarters near Orlando, Florida: a white colonnaded building on a thousand acres, complete with a Tupperware Walk of Fame, a Loyalty Garden, a Poly Pond (where women could be baptised with ‘Tupper Magic’) and a 42-foot-long mural called Evolution of Dishes. Wise instigated the annual ...”

“... about, Alvarez puts one in mind not so much of a reckless slugger and controversialist like Norman Mailer, as of a more genteel tradition of eccentric but robust writing; of a writer like A.J. Liebling, say, a man of legendary appetites, who found in boxing, as in eating and friendship, a source of pleasure, not merely an excuse for braggadocio and ...”

“... life David was less restrained. She never seems to have needed the advice she later got from Norman Douglas to do as she pleased ‘and send everybody to hell’, and stepped outside the social pale with barely a backward glance. As a deb, bored by the Season, she was already telling her sister Pris that ‘very soon’ if Mummie isn’t ‘jolly careful ...”

“... but despite the rollcall of topics Murray reminded him that they had discussed – ‘Street, Norman Shaw, a volume of topography articles, an Approach to Victorian Architecture, the next volume of memoirs’ – none was forthcoming. ‘William Hickey’ in the Daily Express foresaw Betjeman’s likely role as poet laureate and commissioned him to write ...”

“... one exemplary indication of the pressures that he was likely to encounter under constant exposure. Norman Tebbit – even then adept at formulating the relevant test to apply and the right euphemism in which to cloak it – had already said that what Joseph lacked was ‘that indefinable quality that makes a national political leader’. In short, the whole ...”

“... made much of an effort to rescue him from the appearance of failure. Although few went as far as Norman Fruman in condemning Coleridge as an impotent fraud and plagiarist, many reluctantly agreed with Thomas McFarland when he declared: ‘Coleridge’s ruin, in both life and work, is ... the true human fact; the academic classic and the conventional ...”

“... at last meets his idol, the great writer Bergotte, he gets a terrible shock: instead of the ‘white-haired, sweet Singer’ of his imagination, he sees ‘a young man, uncouth, short, thickset and myopic, with a red nose shaped like a snail-shell and a black goatee’. The fantasy Bergotte vanishes, but the caricature that replaces him is not ...”

“... it is worse than that. They all knew what they ought to do. They kept on spelling it out, in every White Paper and Cabinet minute. But they could never face doing it. In 1951, 20 per cent of all public expenditure and nearly 8 per cent of GDP went on defence. The incoming Tory foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, back in his old post, told the Cabinet in June 1952 ...”

“... off her stays by the water’s edge and never wore them again’, and was remembered in flowing white robes by a girl from Glasgow: ‘the first grown-up I had ever seen wearing bare feet and sandals.’ The marriage was, eventually, consummated, and the first of four daughters was born in 1911. The family and her own work began to take up more and more of ...”

“... she favoured black silk cloaks and trousers, tricorn hats, blood-red lipstick and cadaverish white face-powder – Tallulah Bankhead was not the only acquaintance to nickname her ‘Countess Dracula’. Yet such was de Acosta’s sinister allure she managed to bed just about everybody who was anybody in the sapphic world of her time: from Isadora ...”

“... was one of shiny appliances, finned automobiles with hood ornaments fit for Vikings, black and white television sets piping perky laugh-track entertainment into the living room as the kids did their homework lying on the rug, backyard barbecues, pool parties, and drunken passes and spats at cocktail parties that entered local lore. Updike’s early stories ...”