“... found much to say about de la Mare, although his illustrious admirers have ranged from Virginia Woolf to Derek Walcott, from Robert Frost to W.H. Auden, from Thomas Hardy to T.S. Eliot, not to speak of confrères such as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and Henry Newbolt. Ezra Pound, although savage in his denunciation of the use of idioms or phrases such as ...”

“... were added, later its most memorable feature, a grand triumphal Trojan staircase of Mussolini or Cecil B. De Mille proportions, from the top of which you could see France on a clear day. Inside, there was a Moorish courtyard, marble everywhere and extravagant murals by José María Sert, ‘the Tiepolo of the Ritz’. Philip was fully aware of the high camp ...”

“... Andy Warhol. Her sister Lee offered her support and then gossiped about her to Truman Capote and Cecil Beaton. (‘You don’t know what it is like being with Jackie,’ she told Beaton. ‘She can’t sleep at night and she can’t stop thinking about herself and never feeling anything but sorry for herself.’) When Ben Bradlee and his wife suggested that ...”

“... way blocked by the presence of Stein’s image, by the sternly hieratic presence in portraits by Cecil Beaton, Man Ray and Carl Van Vechten. There were the biographers who were indifferent to her writing but interested in her celebrity, or her relationship with Toklas, or both. There were the researchers who loved her writing and sought to decode it, and who ...”

“... sadly, now infected with salmonella’). Then there is the long line of sex-scandal casualties: Cecil Parkinson, Tim Yeo, David Mellor (greatly exaggerated, but not his only alleged misdemeanour), Hartley Booth, Michael Brown (though he is a borderline case, since he resigned from office while denying allegations that he had had a homosexual ...”

“... expecting it to be, well, she wasn’t sure what she expected, but it wasn’t what it was. ‘Oh. Cecil Beaton. Did you know him?’ ‘No, maam.’ ‘No, of course not. You’d be too young. He always used to be round here, snapping away. And a bit of a tartar. Stand here, stand there. Snap, snap. So there’s a book about him ...”

“... when I go to London, I load up on greasy wartime postcards in one of the memorabilia shops in Cecil Court. (‘Helping an Ambulance through the Mud’, ‘Armée Anglaise en Observation’, ‘The Destruction at Louvain, Belgium’, ‘Tommy at Home in German Dugouts!’) I’ve got a whole shelf on war artists: C.R.W. Nevinson, Paul Nash, William ...”

“... reconstruction by a literary scholar of the path to modern realism, from the Odyssey to Virginia Woolf, whose route included Ammianus, Gregory of Tours, Saint-Simon, historians and memorialists along with poets and novelists. Literature thus both preceded history in Ginzburg’s cursus, and has always thereafter lain adjacent to it. There is a long tradition ...”