“... The Vortex was a synonym for homosexuality – ‘Noël Coward put his homosexuality in a little silver box and sniffed it.’ It is vastly more likely that Coward simply sat down to write a shocker about fashionable drug-taking, which was much in the headlines. It is just as likely that his early comedies were simply vehicles for people to be entertainingly ...”

“... secretary Tory Dennistoun is connected, like almost everyone else in the book, to her own silver-lined and gloriously inevitable parenthesis: ‘Tory Dennistoun (now Lady Oaksey)’. Suffering from a sebaceous cyst Betjeman attended the Acland Nursing Home, and ‘he was nursed there by the historical novelist Mary Renault,’ the lucky thing: the ...”

“... starl. No sense of starl.’ He was taken up by Maurice Bowra, and through him grew friendly with Kenneth Clark, 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 ...”

“... were Jacques Barzun, R.P. Blackmur, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Delmore Schwartz, Allen Tate, Kenneth Burke, Robert Fitzgerald, Leslie Fiedler and John Crowe Ransom – this last its founder as a school of literary criticism ‘to teach those who teach it’. Marianne Moore, in Brooklyn, had a quieter time, but was just as much in touch with them all ...”

“... for £155,000 (nearly £9,000,000 today), he secured a Rubens, two Rembrandts, an assortment of silver and Jean-Antoine Houdon’s life-size marble Diana, which took pride of place in the entrance of his Paris house as it once had at Tsarskoye Selo. All the works avoided French customs duty due to Gulbenkian’s diplomatic status as a member of the Persian ...”

“... So there they were, for the second time in a week, homeless … the newly risen sun glinted on the silver barrage balloons and silhouetted the broken outline of bombed and partially demolished buildings. The usual smell of charred timber and burning bricks. On the other side of the tape was sunlit emptiness. A man, standing halfway up the road, shimmered in ...”

“... had put an end to commercial traffic on the river. Clemens was out of a job. Besides, the Nevada silver rush promised a quick return on what family money – including proportions of Orion’s salary – could be diverted for the speculation. The content (of course) but also the tone and general quality of writing are totally different in Clemens’s letters ...”

“... to prove that Clinton’s copy of Vox was a gift from Monica Lewinsky, which she said it was, Kenneth Starr subpoenaed records from two Washington bookshops.) Erotic material for readers who won’t trip up on words like ‘relevé’ and jokes about J.M. Barrie, Vox (1992) recounts a long conversation between a man and a woman on a $1.90-a-minute ...”

“... he read it at an inn while eating cold chicken and drinking particularly good coffee out of a silver pot. Toad, of The Wind in the Willows, would not be such a personality if he had not, at a very low point in his fortunes, responded to the wonderful smell of hot cabbage in the ‘bubble and squeak between two plates’ which the gaoler’s daughter had ...”

“... there are skies to be seen there which are never seen in his pictures – for instance, a silver-gilded sky that Tiepolo might have painted.) Constable’s landscapes, then, often present a contrast between a terrestrial nature that is benign and ordered and on a human scale and a celestial nature that is ungovernable and hostile as well as vast. In ...”

“... in August 1929, and spread the Baldwinite result – a horse-drawn harvester set off against a silver sea – over half a page. Clough Williams-Ellis stretched Tyneham’s view of Worbarrow Bay over the end-papers of his passionately-argued conservationist volume Britain and the Beast. There could scarcely have been a more evocative picture of an England ...”

“... the story when the messenger of the gods hovers above the holocaust of London: ‘His helmet was silver, his body was glass, mercury filled his veins.’ The thermometer is an apt emblem for these stories, with its implications both of the feverish and of the clinical. The point of explosion towards which the temperature is constantly rising often takes a ...”

“... He had mined the archive for The James Family and for his long-authoritative edition (with Kenneth Murdock) of The Notebooks of Henry James, which came out in the same year; together with Henry James: The Major Phase (1944), these made him the central force in the field. With his going, there was only Leon Edel (who in due course encouraged his ...”

“... pretentiousRenata Adler – crackpotSusan Sontag – nobodyNora Ephron – liarOther hand:Kenneth Tynan – creepTruman Capote – leechGeorge Plimpton – slickTom Wolfe – talentlessPhilip Roth – jerkIt was a mercy she only had two hands. To be fair, there were some men she liked. They tended to be showbusiness people. She liked Robin ...”