“... could have made her work vulnerable to disfavour. The handful of her poems recently printed in Roger Lonsdale’s 18th-Century Women Poets were very favourably received. In ‘Washing-Day’ the ‘domestic Muse’ abandons ‘Language of gods’ for gossip. In slip-shod measure loosely prattling on Of farm or orchard, pleasant curds and cream, Or ...”

“... idiotic and unnecessary tennis knick-knacks like T-shirts and caps, there’s the sullen crowd of young pros dressed as walking billboards for Hertz, Movado or Volvo rather than as tea-sipping athletes in white flannels. Even the commentators are pros (some of them, like Cliff Drysdale and John McEnroe, excellent ones). In nearly every way tennis has become ...”

“... after he has dug his grave, refusing to move into the immaterial. Concerning Vesalius’ series, Roger Caillois remarked in his essay ‘Au coeur du Fantastique’ that ‘more genuine mystery crops up in such documents, in which precision is of the essence, than in the wildest inventions of Hieronymus Bosch.’ In the dissection groups, imagination was ...”

“... ambiguity as well as ambition, with a premium on stealth as well as wealth. When Nigel, nephew of Roger, bishop of Salisbury, took on the job in 1126 (or thereabouts) he was simply called ‘the treasurer’. He resigned when made bishop of Ely in 1133 – not the sort of career progression to be expected these days. But the bishop of Salisbury, versatile in ...”

“... sedition: Sam’s coffee house was the base of the royalist journalist and official press censor Roger L’Estrange, who described it as a place ‘where a company of honest fellows meet to confound the lyes of a caball of shamming whigs’. And, while coffee houses collectively might indeed be public places with heterogeneous clienteles, each had its own ...”

“... morning alter Virginia and Leonard had talked with her and tried to comfort her. In September 1934 Roger Fry died of a heart attack. These and other deaths affected her deeply, and her letters about them are movingly simple. To Carrington: ‘I find I cant write without suddenly thinking Oh but Lytton wont read this, and it takes all the point out of it. I ...”

“... 1962, he described a scene he had thought of including in North by Northwest (1959), but didn’t. Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) is on his way from New York to Chicago. Why not have him stop off at Detroit, then still in its Motor City heyday? I wanted to have a long dialogue scene between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers as they walk along the ...”

“... the sad, remote father, the brothers, particularly Sande, and his wife Arloie, Reuben Kadish, Roger Wilcox, Rita Benton. They write with respect about Lee Krasner and without parti pris. My impression is that the book is written with justice. Many of their witnesses are still very much alive. The book – which in certain passages could be mistaken for a ...”

“... fronted by Freddie Bird, a well-respected face, who witnessed the current Mr Squires (a pre-Bond Roger Moore) doing a runner, before the bouncers moved in.Home’s praxis is the stuff of London: confrontation, violence, ‘the poetry of the inarticulate’. He was born on the southern fringes of Merton (close to the parklands once tended by the bucolic poet ...”

“... to a chic bar in order to catch a glimpse of the patron, the legendary Georges Carpentier. I saw young boys, in Saint Malo, flinging themselves into Boyhood of Raleigh postures as they saw the four masts of the late Alain Colas’s yacht appear on the distant horizon, and I heard it pass from lip to lip that Colas was back again. When his rival, Eric ...”

“... Inevitably, perhaps, these biographers often dress up speculations of their own as fact: that the young Wordsworth operated as a government spy, for instance, that Byron was a ruthless paedophile, or that Claire Clairmont in 1816 confessed that she had conceived a child by Shelley which he helped her to abort. For a variety of reasons, the life of Mary ...”

“... night and sexual behaviour of the Haredim, to whom apparently sexuality is a fearsome thing. Their young couples, who barely know each other, are kept in total sexual ignorance until their wedding day, when they are hurriedly briefed, a procedure which sometimes sends them into shock. The groom is instructed to close all blinds and curtains so that he will ...”

“... scrutiny by the sociologists, and Richard Hoggart was affirming in The Uses of Literacy that a young man like Potter is ‘cut off by his parents as much as by his talent which urges him to break away from his group’. Alienation was all the rage and Potter took on the role of outsider on the inside with relish. At Oxford he was a working-class ...”

“... When​ I was young I thought poetry and poetry anthologies could change the world. ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads,’ Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun wrote, ‘he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ But nationality still mattered: Seamus Heaney’s reaction to his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry was ‘My passport’s green ...”

“... it will be born dead.”’Comyns was writing with hindsight about herself as a naive young woman who knew nothing about birth control. ‘I had a kind of idea if you controlled your mind and said “I won’t have any babies” very hard, they most likely wouldn’t come. I thought that was what was meant by birth control.’ But Sophia soon ...”