“... quite as strong as our sense of jubilation, of ‘a giant step for mankind’. Further, as Peter and Leni Gillman suggest (prosaically or poetically), ‘Space Oddity’ sounds like an experience of shooting heroin, and they sternly quote another Bowie lyric: Ashes to ashes, funk to funky, We know Major Tom’s a junkie. Anyway, Major Tom helped to ...”

“... to Ian)? Was Barbara Skelton having an affair with the Polish war artist Feliks Topolski when Peter Quennell came onto the scene, still married to his third wife, Glur, but making Topolski so jealous that the men resorted to fisticuffs over Barbara? What made Janetta, still married to Hugh Slater, fall in love with Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, and would that ...”

“... in a rosy halo, and Nathanael at the opposite side, staring through his glass. She wore a plain white silky dress, which the light filled with pink flares and sanguine folds.’ And here is Humphry Wellwood’s production of The Winter’s Tale, staged at one of the Fabian summer camps: ‘There was a goat-horned herm, with shaggy thighs, and a naked girl ...”

“... work had let go earlier. He began the ‘Russian Nights’ enterprise on the crest of a wave. The White Hotel (1981) catapulted him to international fame. It was a novelist’s fairy-tale: ignored or ridiculed as high-falutin’ pornography in the UK, Thomas’s Freudian fantasia sold only a few hundred and seemed destined for oblivion. But it was ...”

“... with curled pink and bronze petals, in a little silver-plated vase. We sat holding large white menu-cards folded down the middle, and glanced around at the other diners. The room was warm, busy and quiet. We were delighted. Steadily, and without the slightest straining for effect, the picture is built up. The last sentence frames it off with just a ...”

“... Now another guide enters and, propping herself, kneels by me with a small bowl. She removes a white lotion (baby cream?) and then starts to massage (I see, the medium is the massage) my hand. At first I am unresilient, but then begin to ply her hand with the lotion. Couples begin putting the stuff on hands, arms and faces to feel and touch. We are inside ...”

“... he only really sputtered to life again in 1990 with an autobiography, and died a few years later. Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg at the Hotel de Londres, Paris in 1957. Bob Thompson, ‘LeRoi Jones and his Family’ (1964) Brion Gysin, ‘Calligraphy’ (1960) Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs, Untitled (Primrose Path, the Third Mind, p.12, 1965) Ettore ...”

“... personality of the hero in the manner of other series of mystery novels – Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, Miss Marple, Travis McGee et al. The Francis pattern is more like an obsession: the hero suffers great physical pain and humiliation at the hands of a villain who is often so well liked, powerful and respected that no one but the hero can believe in ...”

“... Her name was Sophie Catchprice. She had bell-bottomed jeans and long blonde hair like Mary in Peter Paul and Mary. She had bare feet and chipped red nail-polish on her toenails. She stood at the door of her bedroom one Saturday afternoon and saw her husband sucking her younger son’s penis. What’s admirable here is that Carey manages not only to shock ...”

“... which succeeds in spite of itself and the line it takes. Edward Garnett told Lawrence that The White Peacock had every fault known to the English novel but that its author had genius. Elizabeth Smart was not a genius: but she is the rare case of a writer who succeeds by writing as if she were one. She succeeded in her own way, the inflated and overheated ...”

“... John Sparrow, Henry Yorke, Alan Pryce-Jones, Osbert Lancaster, Robert Byron, Anthony Powell, Peter Quennell, Tom Driberg, Harold Acton, Christopher Sykes, Randolph Churchill, W.H. Auden, and lots of others, including Gaitskell once more (‘Hugh, may I stroke your bottom?’ ‘Oh, I suppose so, if you must’). With Auden he went to bed; also, according ...”

“... it: his inability to chat, his coarse red hair, which he ceased to hate only when it turned into a white mane. In a Scots word, he was crabbit – which shares that fricative ‘cr-’ with so many kindred words: crusty, cross-grained, crag, craggy, crozzley, crooked. Wainwright wrote and drew himself onto his pages with an unequalled completeness and an ...”

“... In City Without Walls, W.H. Auden included this squib: Even Hate should be precise: very few White Folks have fucked their mothers. A valid point, except that, in a sense, Auden’s plea for precision is vitiated by his easily explained misapprehension that ‘mother-fucker’ is an epithet exclusively applied to whites by blacks. Auden’s experience ...”

“... has mostly worn one dress for 27 years. She has had it made forty times, in different fabrics: white for the Miami summer and black for the New York winter and grey for inbetween times. It is softly toga-like; you pull it over your head. She specially likes the way it frames her face. (The man who designed it lives in a trailer in upstate New York and is ...”

“... glass on a tour of local schools. That year the council’s then leader described Morris as ‘a white imperialist’ of no relevance to Walthamstow. The spectacular row which ensued generated online petitions, national press coverage and representations from the William Morris Society in the United States. Morris’s birthday, 24 March, saw demonstrations ...”