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“... have a memory of sitting there and feeling smug,’ she wrote of attending a class taught by John Crowe Ransom in 1938. She identified as a Trotskyite, placing herself on the anti-Stalinist left along with the writers she admired: Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy.Hardwick wanted to flee to New York, like ‘a provincial in Balzac, yearning ...”

“... but a guy liked to have good hair. Then some magic descended on him, and the magician was John Huston, who wrote the script for High Sierra (1941). It’s the story of a veteran gangster, Roy Earle, who wants peace and a new life. But as he comes out of prison, the girl he likes dumps him and he’s on the hook for one more job. Huston saw him ...”

“... John Carey’s new book, like his last one, The Intellectuals and the Masses, is a little swizzle-stick perfectly designed for flattening airy literary bubbles. Surprisingly, it is likable, wise and often right, the more so in tending to contradict The Intellectuals and the Masses, which had none of these qualities ...”

“... among them Jefferson, Lecky, Baldwin, Churchill, Guedalla and Plumb (who lumps George with King John as ‘one of England’s most disastrous kings’). Roberts tells us with his trademark thump that now Elizabeth II has allowed more than 200,000 pages of the Georgian Archives at Windsor to be published – 85 per cent of them for the first time – ‘it ...”

“... of random encounters on the road. The Hitch-Hiker (1953), by the pioneering female director Ida Lupino, followed the trail of a psychopath on a hitchhiking murder spree, opening with a warning caption: ‘The car might have been yours – or that young couple across the aisle.’ The 1970s, perhaps the peak decade for hitchhiking in Britain, was also a ...”

“... In November 1902, Ida Tarbell published ‘The Birth of an Industry’, the first of 19 reports for McClure’s Magazine about the organisation that had come to control 90 per cent of the business – still new at the time – of producing oil. Collected two years later in her History of the Standard Oil Company, the series did little to celebrate the company or its founder, John D ...”

“... actor. Carole Lombard, who had worked with Fredric March, Charles Laughton, William Powell and John Barrymore, thought him more remarkable than any of them. On screen, his name appeared as James Stewart, and he worked hard at every detail. He was a canny businessman. Before the Second World War, he invested in a small airline. Soon after the war, taking ...”

“... I also read George III and the Mad Business by the mother-and-son partnership Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, who first put forward the theory that the King’s illness was physical not mental and that he was suffering from porphyria. I found it a difficult book to read, convincing about George III himself but less so about the other historical cases the ...”

“... a bit of a kid in person, too. Adam Roberts thoughtfully includes among his appendices a memoir by John Addington Symonds in which he records the impression of something ‘almost childish’ about Tennyson’s metaphysical opinions, and you can see what he means: ‘I do not know whether to think the universe great or little,’ he records the great man ...”

“... and Jewish musicians, among other free-floating symbols. Chagall’s 17-year-old daughter Ida modelled for ‘Nude over Vitebsk’ (1933) in the garden at Villa Montmorency. Chagall himself floated above some of 20th-century Europe’s greatest catastrophes, as Jackie Wullschlager details in a massive biography that gracefully integrates a ...”

“... people better off, and a pinched, scuffling way of life,’ Rampersad writes. Ralph’s mother, Ida, worked as a janitor and maid to raise Ralph and his brother, Herbert. She died in Cincinnati, at 52, possibly from tuberculosis of the hip. Mentored by members of the Oklahoma City black elite who saw promise in the boy, Ralph first escaped his family in ...”

“... Freeman recalled that at the Assumption Convent, then temporarily evacuated to Hereford, Mother Ida ‘habitually woke up an asthmatic friend of mine, Mary Bowen, by laughingly placing a pillow over her face’. Not all nuns were bad news, though. ‘It’s the interface between nunliness and normality that convent girls remember vividly,’ Maxtone Graham ...”

“... her siblings’ madness. Harold was less enthusiastic. He had his own nightmares – one starred John Galsworthy ‘belabouring’ him with a huge steak – and his own sexual problems: he climbed into bed on his wedding night grunting ‘Come here, boy.’ He may have been disturbed by Mew’s quaintness; he certainly found her difficult. When he published ...”

“... star, but which applied to literature too, the success of J.B. Priestley and, at a later date, John Braine evinced by their brisk departure from their Bradford birthplace. In this respect the Brontë Sisters (Mam had seen the films, though she’d not read the books) were thought to be tragic figures, not on account of their bleak upbringing or their short ...”

“... of Pinel and Chiarugi on the Continent, but domestic parallels as well, such as the work of John Ferriar at the Manchester Lunatic Asylum in the 1790s, or of Edward Long Fox, from whose Bristol madhouse Tuke recruited Katherine Allen, the Retreat’s first matron. In what ways does Porter claim to go beyond this? First, by widening the circle of those ...”