“... of The Dance of Death, unclassified on its title page, though indicated within, was endorsed by Harold Hobson in 1933 as ‘that most frivolous of entertainments, the musical comedy’, here transformed into an instrument for serious drama, ‘as though one were to see No, No, Nanette taken, without incongruity, as the mouthpiece for a 20th-century Contrat ...”

“... his health was destroyed, his dependence on opium crippling, his marriage all to pieces, his love for Sara Hutchinson frustrated, his collaboration with Wordsworth curdling into a matter of jealous resentment, the poetry for which we chiefly remember him all in the past, his hopes and his reasons for hope decayed. He was not yet at the ...”

“... from the top of the tower block which stands in the middle of the Caltech campus. It read: ‘WE LOVE YOU DICK.’ The obituary of Feynman in the LA Times was awed and affectionate. It listed his achievements – his work in physics, the Nobel Prize it earned him and his work on the nuclear bomb. It also recalled his reputation as a womaniser, a drummer and ...”

“... set off in an amazing way.’ So artists loved the way Fraser treated their work; they didn’t love the way he treated them. They all complain about the difficulty or impossibility of getting paid. Clive Barker spells out the most maddening part of it: In the mid-1960s Robert would say to me, ‘I’ll give you that money when I see you.’ But he ...”

“... for instance, as children both used thieving as a way of securing their mothers’ exclusive love. Lewis’s quest for extreme sensations perhaps mirrors his creator’s impatience with the complacencies of the Wasp milieu in which he grew up (private schools in Manhattan and Massachusetts, followed by Princeton and Harvard, from which he graduated with ...”

“... Graham Greene was more than half in love with easeful failure. He chose to end A Sort of Life, the sly memoir of his early years that stood in for an autobiography, with ‘the years of failure which followed the acceptance of my first novel’, adding the characteristic gloss that ‘failure too is a kind of death’ and so may conclude the story of a life as appropriately as one’s last breath ...”

“... my life’, as a loveless matter of money. Johnson himself declared it, according to Boswell, a ‘love marriage on both sides’. Tetty spent her last years largely bedridden and in a haze of opium and alcohol: for Nokes she exemplifies the human vanities Johnson dissected in the Rambler. The publication of the Dictionary marked a watershed in Johnson’s ...”

“... they would show up at the offices, usually to drop something off: a story, or a poem, or a love letter, or a rant, or an obsessively meticulous rendering of an obsessively meticulous New Yorker cover by Jenny Oliver – or most common of all, a confession. In those days, the New Yorker was also a kind of Miss Lonelyhearts. At first, I had thought that ...”

“... mix of forthrightness and equivocation. Wyler’s film, highly unusually, uses a disabled person, Harold Russell, in a major role. For once, disablement in the movies is a matter of visible absence rather than disguised presence, unlike Lon Chaney’s strapped-up legs visible in profile in The Penalty (1920), or Spencer Tracy’s theoretically missing arm ...”

“... nobody, not even Oswald Mosley or Richard Nixon, was capable of radiating such unease in company. Harold Macmillan couldn’t stand having Powell opposite him in cabinet looking ‘like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes’. So he relocated Enoch way down the table where he couldn’t catch his glittering eye. There is only one passage in ...”

“... the villain within a hero by turning, for instance, Tony Blair MP into ‘I’m Tory Plan B’ or Harold Wilson into ‘Lord Loinwash’. He gives my edition of the Sonnets some genial stick for emphasising their oral and performative aspects (I was just trying to get people to read them), rather than dwelling on how their letters dance into different visible ...”

“... time been 16, and pregnant. Babalola had taken her home, lent her to his friends, then fallen in love with her, and married her. Janet does not feature extensively in Adah’s story; she is there primarily as an image of a person in a phone box. Her introduction into it opens that story out: to new dangers, but also to the potential for change, in Adah and ...”

“... Boy, which he shot in one take. ‘From the first day on I hadn’t a doubt that I was going to love working in the movies. I did not even ask what I’d be paid to work in Arbuckle’s slapstick comedies. I didn’t much care,’ Keaton said. He went on: ‘I’d fallen in love with the movies – with the cameras, with ...”

“... was met by progressively more invasive medical procedures. Too much treatment and not enough love eventually killed him, about as unpleasantly as could be imagined. The authors discuss this case, not as an isolated if appalling error of judgment, but as a symptom of a much deeper failing in the medical profession. The quest for certainty: more tests mean ...”

“... By the end of his time at the university he had camouflaged his origins sufficiently to fool Harold Laski, who suggested that he go into social work to get to know the working class. The present, and last, volume of Glasser’s autobiography covers his post-Oxford, post-war years. It begins with his marriage to an anti-semitic middle-class English ...”