“... factologist or stolid demystifier, studiously pulling back the veil on the profusion of mysteries. Barbara Guest’s Herself Defined (1984) is still unsurpassed for flair and poetic acuity. Hollenberg’s book is thorough, but at times pedestrian. Does it really matter that H.D. had goose for Christmas dinner, or that she went to a café ‘twice a ...”

“... with Padgett and Berrigan, and thereafter found herself making more than a hundred surprise guest appearances, often in the most unlikely of circumstances: ‘If Nancy Was a Building in New York City’ (that famous skyline with her spiky corona of hair replacing a block in midtown); ‘If Nancy Was a Sailor’s Basket’ (a diminutive Nancy waving from ...”

“... sharp-eyed, dispassionate post-mortem on what actually happened in the making of Kane, and Barbara Leaming’s almost embarrassingly intimate monitoring of the variations in the maker’s oft-told tales during what turned out to be the last five years of Welles’s life, finally extinguish the myth that the newly-made master-piece was an instant and ...”

“... He’s currently a professor of film and media theory at the University of California at Santa Barbara and hasn’t published more than a handful of essays since 1988. Kraus and Lotringer still work together but are no longer married. Kraus has written three more novels and two books of art criticism, and has become a fairy godmother figure to a generation ...”

“... death. The other most faithful follower, who could have been a novelist in her own right, was Barbara Cooper. Arriving in London from the North of England in 1939, she became Lehmann’s secretary and the only person apart from him who was allowed to read the contributions and even reject them. She was also ‘allowed’ to do the postage and packing, to ...”

“... the names of Dr Tyacke and Dr Lake that the one bishop apparently on the Queen’s side was Edmund Guest, Bishop of Rochester and the Queen’s almoner. Most of the others differed sharply from the Queen, and the result was an uneasy compromise: ‘The iconoclastic bishops ... won the de facto right to enforce their opinions, did not win ... the de jure ...”

“... perversity of the colonial subject, the urge to be both a contrarian and an agreeably exotic house guest of the metropolitan nation. The Irish émigré is sufficiently au fait with English conventions to manipulate them even more deftly than the natives themselves, yet sufficiently estranged from them to be aware of their arbitrariness and occasional ...”

“... Prada.’ Erika Diane Rappaport, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, puts the feminist debate about shopping – does it liberate or exploit women? – into a much broader historical context, analysing the late 19th-century transformation of the West End, especially Oxford Street and its environs, into a retail centre ...”

“... than any of these. She is Gabriel García Márquez’s voice.In an interview with Luis Harss and Barbara Dohmann, Marquez says clearly that his language is his grandmother’s. ‘She spoke that way.’ ‘She was a great storyteller.’ Anita Desai has said of Indian households that the women are the keepers of the tales, and the same appears to be the case ...”

“... silk wedding dress.’ The relationship between Jack and Jackie, as outlined in lurid detail in Barbara Leaming’s Mrs Kennedy, takes Jackie from her role as Maisie to the role of Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl. She had her prince and her life of luxury. When she went every day to classes in American history at Georgetown University she was accompanied ...”

“... bleaker opening than this one from the title story of Joy Williams’s 2004 collection, Honoured Guest: She had been having a rough time of it and thought about suicide sometimes, but suicide was so corny in the eleventh grade and you had to be careful about this because two of her classmates had committed suicide the year before and between them they left ...”

“... on the sea’, as he called it, in the late 1920s. The weeks Sturges spent as Eleanor’s house guest at Mar-a-Lago supplied him with abundant material when he came to write and direct The Palm Beach Story (1942), which exemplifies his approach to film in the challenge it poses to Hollywood decorum through riotous alternations of slapstick and salty ...”

“... he was travelling on a Sunday to Blackpool with the Swedish Prime Minister, Tag Erlander, as his guest. Wilson was explaining his plans for building the New Britain. The train clanked to a halt. For half an hour it stood stationary and then shunted slowly backwards down the line. British Rail never failed to provide us with metaphors as Wilson travelled the ...”

“... run the world economy. The debates are usually conducted by American professors of economics, with guest appearances by George Soros. The differences between them, however, are quite minor because everyone seems to agree that there is no fundamental alternative to globalisation. And it is because of this absence of an alternative that refusal or reluctance to ...”

“... Selfridges one afternoon to visit a friend and was struck by advertising slogans that said, à la Barbara Kruger, I shop, therefore I am. And I couldn’t help but wonder that as I couldn’t actually shop, ergo what?’ At the UK Feminista summer school in Birmingham meanwhile, Emily Birkenshaw, 24, a teaching assistant from York, was learning how to ‘go ...”