“... Coetzee, one of the bombers of the Worcester Shopping Mall in 1996, who came across as a wrecked man. Four people died in Worcester and 67 were injured, many of them seriously. Coetzee had been a member of the white Afrikaans Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement) and an admirer of Wit Wolf Barend Strydom, who in 1988 massacred seven black people ...”

“... lesbian women: the American heiress and intellectual polymath Esther Murphy (1897-1962); Mercedes de Acosta (1893-1968), the Cuban-American Hollywood screenwriter, memoirist and seductress extraordinaire (Garbo and Dietrich and Isadora Duncan were among her conquests); and the brittle yet pioneering British fashion editor and stylesetter Madge Garland ...”

“... noted committed Trumpistas (Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Chris Christie); a few party stalwarts (Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell – who was booed) taking a sip of, if not exactly drinking the Trump Kool-Aid; and a breadline of hungry ‘rising stars’, fixed on the 2020 elections, hoping to be discovered as Barack Obama was at the 2004 Democratic Convention. On ...”

“... dance of the intellect, if you will, and in these qualities have an affinity with the painting of Paul Klee. His syntax plays a critical role, with its orderings, the alternating presences and absences, its copulae or want of; clauses gone floating from the main substantive and verb; periodicity, abrupt declarative bursts. The poems have a tense, torqued ...”

“... monkey to modern woman), Kurt Weill and Max Reinhardt, E.E. Cummings and Janet Flanner, Sartre and de Beauvoir. Alexander Calder’s wire caricature of her (it seems to move on the page of Petrine Archer-Straw’s book) was the prototype for his subsequent mobiles.‘I never saw anybody move the way she did. She was part kangaroo and part prizefighter. A woman ...”

“... beautiful green-floral heart’. It smelled so delicious, Chanel told a press conference, that a man had stopped her in the street outside the Ritz – ‘not bad at my age’. She never stopped expecting everyone else to smell like her and look like her. ‘I imposed black,’ she told her friend Paul Morand in the ...”

“... Peggy Guggenheim, Djuna Barnes. Figures associated with Proust would sometimes be there – Lily de Gramont, the duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, for instance, whom Barney insisted on introducing to Capote (an interest in celebrities was ‘one of her hang-ups’). Many were queer women. ‘Miss Barney’s circle was not ...”

“... declare that he wanted to be sure that he really was in with the upper classes and not, like Paul Pennyfeather at the end of Decline and Fall, once more drinking cocoa with Stubbs and listening to a paper on the Polish plebiscites; that everyone had stopped mocking him as a cuckold after his first wife had left him; that he was not, like so many of his ...”

“... sounds,’ she once said, ‘like I’m starring at the Gaiety Theater.’ Her brother, Paul, called her Doke. Childhood friends called her Dodo or Didi or Priscilla Preoccupied. Michael Curtiz called her Miss Lachrymose (she could weep on cue). Jack Carson called her Zelda. Fans called her Miss Huckleberry Finn. Film crews called her Nora Neat and ...”

“... he was imprisoned and narrowly escaped a heretic’s death. It was only by the grace of Lorenzo de’ Medici that he was allowed to return to Florence and take up a quieter life. But once Il Magnifico was dead and his son Piero was in charge – with French troops bearing down on the city and Savonarola preaching in the pulpit – not even the philosophers ...”

“... appeal. There is a rare wholeness about The Book of Ebenezer Le Page. You get the entire man, in a way that isn’t usually within the gift of literature to procure. It is ‘the book of’ in the prosaic sense that Edwards’s character speaks it (or writes it in his three big notebooks bought for 18/6 at ‘the Press Office in Smith Street’ in St ...”

“... differences. Consider, for example, the two best English painters of the Eighties generation – Paul Nash and Lewis. In their early careers there are some remarkable resemblances: in both cases public school was followed by study at the Slade, early recognition by older artists, exhibitions (they were both represented in the ‘English Post-Impressionists ...”

“... of serial killers, leaving their fingerprints everywhere), and sometimes abstract (the Esprit de Système, the Idea of Freedom, Capitalism ...). Many of the accused seemed convincing culprits at the time, but such is the nature of historical inquiry that even the occasional Holmes among historians failed to make the charges stick for ...”

“... when the pair were living in Dove Cottage, with William still unmarried, were picked up by De Quincey, and have been used by F.W. Bateson and others as an aid to the critical understanding of Wordsworth’s poetry. But the reader can divine, what Gittings and Manton bring out very well, that Wordsworth’s strong – even unusually strong – sexual ...”

“... distance, full as they are of the rare knowledge he had come to by his reading. In La Tentation de Saint Antoine, the desert-dwelling anchorite of that name – an antisocial paragon to whom Flaubert felt sufficiently drawn to go on writing and rewriting the book for thirty years – endures a punishing series of night-time intrusions from various ...”