“... ate with M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child. And when she settled in England in the 1960s, Elizabeth David told her that the bit in her first novel about a dinner of sea urchins, ‘heaped in a great armorial pile … like the unexplained detail on the hill by the thistles and the hermitage of a quattrocento background’, followed by a plain grilled loup and no ...”

“... the drama of her life – her sexuality, her isolation, her love affairs and her exile – may take over from the poems. Her life is likely to rival that of Sylvia Plath as a subject for infinite fascination. It is vital to remember the power these poems had before the details of the poet’s life became public. Some letters are missing. Most of ...”

“... worst section of the 2300-seat palais, with the ‘lumpenproletariat of film lovers’. Frémaux may not be a technocrat, but when I asked fellow film critics at Cannes how they would describe him, the most common responses were ‘politician’ and ‘diplomat’. One Australian programmer compared him to ‘a sales rep for Cartier watches’. At the much ...”

“... is no longer a curse, no longer a birthmark that you carry with you all your life. Rather, it may be fashioned from nothing: it’s a ‘personality bonus’ – words straight out of an Argos catalogue. And if Indianness is addable, it’s also subtractable. Karim, an aspiring actor, is keen to exploit this insight. Since childhood he’s been a fan of ...”

“... anti-colonial activism angered the Portuguese secret police: he was forced into exile and in May 1960 settled in Conakry, capital of the neighbouring Republic of Guinea, which had become independent from France in 1958. Here, with the blessing of the Guinean president, Ahmed Sékou Touré, Cabral set up the headquarters of the African Party for the ...”

“... Faust, despairing of all philosophies, may yet drain a marsh or rescue some acres from the sea.Edward DowdenPassionate art, the drowner of dykes ...W.B. YeatsI suppose this is my biography, my life. Fragments of memory. Perhaps even a memorial. Except that I don’t believe in biographies and advise you to be especially sceptical about this one, written, one has to say, under the stress of illness and in extreme haste ...”

“... believed some principles worth adhering to whatever the repercussions – and well, he may even have been right.’ Russell will compare Ship Money to the Poll Tax, and describe the arrival of James I in London as a foretaste of the Single European Act. Such are the playful flourishes of a scholarly ascendancy. In these pages Blair Worden has even ...”

“... needle-pointer from Singer; at the Albion Works, William Gallacher of the BSP; at Beardmore’s, David Kirkwood, who had recently joined the ILP and was a reluctant supporter of the war (‘I was too proud of the battles of the past to stand aside and see Scotland conquered’); and at Barr and Stroud, John Muir, also of the SLP.The strike ended after a ...”

“... of Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped was really our favourite, but we couldn’t call our daughter David, or name her after Alan Breck. She’d have to be named for the sequel.Like all my contemporaries, in those first years when the contraceptive pill was widely available, I only half believed I could coerce my body, and suspected that it might have some ...”

“... woman Brooke fell in love with was one who was going to remain out of reach for some time. In May 1908 he went to a Fabian supper party to which some grand guests had been invited, including the governor of Jamaica, Sir Sydney Olivier, who brought three of his four beautiful daughters (Laurence Olivier was their younger cousin). He already knew two of the ...”

“... of white women.’Black feminists weren’t the only ones to take offence. In 1986 the novelist David Bradley confessed that the first time he read Native Son,I shed no tears for Bigger. I wanted him dead; by legal means if possible, by lynching if necessary … I did not see Bigger Thomas as a symbol of any kind of black man. To me he was a sociopath, pure ...”

“... We explored the territory together: the Bow Quarter development conjured from the Bryant & May match factory, the weaver’s garret occupied by David Rodinsky above a decommissioned synagogue in Princelet Street, and the first speculative (and doomed) ‘Montmartre meets Montserrat’ restaurant on Dalston ...”

“... is classified ‘B’, meaning ‘no reason not to murder immediately’. Two weeks later, on 15 May 1944, he was one of 878 able-bodied men on Convoy 73, the only one of 79 convoys with no women or children, and the only one not headed for Auschwitz. It went to Kaunas in Lithuania. It is thought that the men were assigned to dig up and burn the bodies of ...”

“... had enough younger people whom I admired, and still had my old chums from the Review, Colin, Hugo, David Harsent; they just carried over and became part of this larger thing.Did you get any help from the eminenti who’d tried to float a magazine?None at all. I didn’t really know them. And didn’t admire them, particularly. There was a whole social aspect ...”

“... Stockport and Rochdale – made the housing crisis central to his re-election campaign in May, when he won a third term by an overwhelming margin. He donates 15 per cent of his salary towards the effort to end rough sleeping. He says he’ll bear down on exploitative landlords who squeeze high rents out of tenants living in damp, chilly, crowded ...”