“... and Ernest Hemingway thought Cather had found the war experiences described in One of Ours in D.W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation. After her literary success, Willa Cather led a secure, lofty, comfortable, solidly middle-class life. But it took her forty years to do so. Born in 1873 among the lush hills and ...”

“... of eminent Victorians was handing out a bouquet to the most eminently Victorian of them all. He’d been hooked ever since he’d first seen Iolanthe in 1907. ‘It’s impossible to believe that a lord chancellor in love with a fairy can be anything but ridiculous,’ he told Leonard Woolf; ‘but one goes, and when the ...”

“... all the more rapidly since she had advertised her arrival by sending on ahead her portrait of David Garrick. Yet the London which threw itself at her feet two years after Hogarth’s death was still recognisably Hogarth’s town, a mixture of polish and jagged edges in which high taste and low life mingled uneasily. Kauffman’s reputation quivered a ...”

“... from the vasty deep. Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them? – strikes a deflationary note familiar enough from recent television interviews. It had a lot to do with the fact that in September 1400 the historical Glyn Dŵr had proclaimed himself Prince of Wales. Some ...”

“... such as Komisarjevsky, Michel Saint-Denis (more fully treated by Croall), Peter Brook and Peter Hall. They are, of course, purely theatrical. Gielgud had an abnormally long theatrical life, appearing in or directing a great many plays in a great many places and also making dozens of movies, so his biographers have felt obliged to be long in their turn. They ...”

“... among people. Sennett believes that artistic performance – in the theatre, at the concert hall – can be our guide. No convincing actor or musician can treat her performance as the occasion to reveal her inner thoughts and feelings. That isn’t what the play or the music is about – we come to hear what Shakespeare or Stravinsky wrote, not to find ...”

“... School overseer was the most literate and attentive of the elders, although outside the Kingdom Hall he might be a window cleaner, school caretaker or vending machine salesman. He would keep a file on each speaking member of the congregation, marking them on tone, projection, modulation, pacing, volume, time management and structure. All this would be ...”

“... expound her work through her own body: eternally ‘an athlete of God’, as she herself says; a David before the Ark. Graham’s own book, finished just before she died and burdened with a reluctant acceptance of mortality in its last pages, nevertheless begins briskly: ‘I am a dancer.’ She knew she still was, although she gave her last performance in ...”

“... to whom Brown was royal gardener, remarked to one of his staff: ‘Now Mellicant you and I can do here what we please.’ His style was popular enough to be widely and often badly imitated, and by the 1790s clumps, belts and lakes seemed stale and formulaic. Uvedale Price spoke for many of his contemporaries when he complained that Brownian gardens looked ...”

“... to his Celtic romanticism’. He was part of a left-wing circle that included Raymond Williams, D.J. Enright and Maurice Craig, a Northern Irishman who remembered Henderson as ‘very loud-voiced, very insistently Scottish, and constantly singing’. During the two years he spent in Cambridge before the Second World War bore him off to North ...”

“... Another pleasure of staying with the Glenconners was that they asked her what she would like to do and what she would like to eat. This was a luxury in a life that ran to a schedule drawn up by others, and which required her to make small talk with tongue-tied local notables while eating her way through the elaborate meals thought appropriate for ...”

“... Though that’s a situation which seems to mirror that of The History Boys the play has nothing to do with my contemporaries, only a couple of whom were historians anyway, but it does draw on some of the pains and the excitement of working for a scholarship at a time when Oxford and Cambridge were as daunting and mysterious to me as to any of the boys in the ...”

“... charming event in the official national calendar gather for a cup of tea in the Georgian town hall of a small market town in the West Midlands. There is a great deal of scarlet in evidence, in the robes of the assembled Council and of sundry invited academics, white in the vestments of the local clergy, and a respectable quantity of gold in the mayoral ...”

“... on which Inglis’s gods and heroes disport themselves. Thus at the memorial meeting in Conway Hall there is Nick Garnham, ‘elegant, intelligent, disdainful Wykehamist’. Earlier, at the Garden House Hotel riot – a Cambridge protest against the rule of the Greek colonels – there is Bob Rowthorn, ‘then as now the best-looking economist in a not ...”

“... while still being suspended mid-air, cushioned by the thermals while posterity figures out what to do with him.Born in 1932 and raised in Pennsylvania, a child of the Depression, Updike reached prominence during the Kennedy era as American literature’s princely elf, his Jiminy Cricket nose peering down with amusement, his tall, gangly frame having the lanky ...”