“... to get better throughout two-thirds of a lifetime?’ This was the man, a novice to movies, whom George Schaefer brought to RKO in 1939: a household name, a radical in politics as in theatre and radio, an iconoclast, a cultivated bon-viveur, a wise old man, a baby, a sophisticate, a tearaway – above all, an intellectual. He was entering a community, noted ...”

“... to upper-class and purposively vulgar fanbase. In its ranks were Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and George Melly, who all later wrote of this time as of a lost Eden. Larkin’s jazz column for the Telegraph ran from 1961 to 1968, a period roughly coextensive with Mod’s quiet rise and noisy fall. Trads embraced a louche, boho scruffiness (silly hats, sloppy ...”

“... with fellow artists and anarchists and encountered the work of van Gogh and the Impressionists George Breitner and Isaac Israëls. His own art, initially, played by the rules. He painted and exhibited conventional still lifes of herrings and apples; when the royal stipend he had received to cover the first year of his tuition wasn’t renewed, he took ...”

“... New York Daily News in the mid-Eighties, ‘Larry Schiller makes Baron von Munchausen look like George Washington.’ Yet at the beginning of this new book there is an appreciation: ‘to Larry Schiller, my skilled and wily colleague in interview and investigation, for the six months we laboured side by side in Minsk and Moscow, and then again in ...”

“... is no other issue ... to think about politically, but I don’t know how to measure happiness,’ George Oppen wrote to June Oppen Degnan in 1970 (an extract from his letter is the epigraph to Midnight Salvage). How, then, should women see themselves? As mosaics, fractured with the lines of putative and possibly regraspable pasts; as fluid, and open – like ...”

“... collected by Saatchi), on established Turner-winning Brits like Richard Long and Gilbert and George, on old bugbears like Warhol and Richard Hamilton. Shortly before Fuller’s death, he thought the tide was turning: Serota seemed to be coming into line, even Saatchi was investing in the School of London. Then it turned right back. In his last completed ...”

“... The Blitz had left bombsites that were thickest around the docks. The cenotaph in front of St George’s Hall told us what had happened to the men who enlisted there. Surrounded by Murphys and Rooneys you could hardly forget the Great Famine that pushed waves of Irish immigrants into Liverpool cellars and court housing. Before the Second World War, thirty ...”

“... time to time this makes people think in the wrong tense: ‘“What was all this, anyway,” mused Walter grimly, “but the physical evidence of all the more fundamental changes that had taken place in Singapore in the last two decades?”’ On occasion quotation marks appear at random in passages of free indirect style: ‘He began to think about other ...”

“... billed as ‘the laugh sensation of two continents’ at the Coconut Grove in Miami: the columnist Walter Winchell called it ‘vulgar’ and Bert Lahr, who played Estragon, got a letter asking what a star of The Wizard of Oz was doing ‘in a play which is communistic, atheistic and existential’. ‘This Miami fiasco does not distress me in the smallest ...”

“... recur throughout A la recherche), engages the nature of his prose as well as his sentiments; as Walter Benjamin said, in one of the finest essays ever written on the novel, Proust’s language is inseparable from his ‘intransigent French spirit’. It is a language with roots reaching deep into the history of French prose from Montaigne through ...”

“... nuclear reactor, are essays about 19th-century women novelists: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. The tribute paid to Austen, in particular, is remarkable both for its warmth and for its acuity. Woolf admired Austen above all for her ability to grasp the exceptional moment – ‘in which all the happiness of life is collected’ – as it ...”

“... he has heard he will be viciously satirised. (If the film is remembered at all, it is as a minor George Cukor film and for the off-screen love affair between Montand and Monroe). Mistaken for an actor, he ends up playing himself onstage, which allows her character to tell him to his face what she thinks of the billionaire who he in fact is: ‘Nothing but a ...”

“... she or Constance objected to the book. Constance proudly pointed out to her a good review of it by Walter Pater. Despite his other liaisons and their many separations, Oscar and Constance continued to move around London together quite happily. He wrote her devoted letters when he was away and maintained good relations with Lady Mount-Temple. In Constance’s ...”

“... was suspicious, but the Huxleys pulled more strings until the marriage was allowed to happen. Walter Bedford thereafter ‘melted back into his existence’ and seems never to have been heard of again.As a child, Bedford spent a lot of time on long train journeys, ‘bundled to and fro’ (a phrase from A Legacy) between Berlin, Baden and sometimes ...”

“... and not only on the Catholic side. Beside Shakespeare’s tribute to Henry stands Sir Walter Ralegh’s protest: ‘if all the pictures and patterns of a merciless prince were lost in the world, they might all again be painted to the life out of the story of this king.’ To the 17th-century republicans Edmund Ludlow and Algernon Sidney, Henry ...”