“... as a lack of romance and took a slew of marriage proposals in her stride. Prince Albert, Duke of York was ‘quite a nice youth’ but he hardly stood out from the crowd. It seems to have been sheer determination that made Bertie, the stammering, nerve-racked and less than handsome second son of George V, persist in proposing to the woman he had ...”

“... aliens. (Nor is this particular combination confined to Los Angeles, as is illustrated by Peter Brimelow’s borrowing of the title of the 1988 science fiction film, Alien Nation, for the anti-immigrant tract he published seven years later.) Congresswoman Seastrand invokes Sodom and Gomorrah because ‘we probably have the most adulterers living here ...”

“... review christening the biography ‘a narrative masterwork’ was published in the New York Times Book Review on 1 April, Bailey tweeted a humblebraggy ‘it’s all downhill from here,’ or words to that effect. He was righter than he knew. Ozick’s magisterial blessing of Roth and The Biography represented the heights and from there on it was ...”

“... let’s have us honey –‘It set the prosodic pattern,’ Berryman told the interviewer, Peter Stitt, who had been a student of his a few years earlier. The interview was conducted in a ward in St Mary’s Hospital in Minneapolis, where Berryman seemed to be comfortable. He spent quite a bit of time there during the last few years of his life. In ...”

“... at theatlasphere.com, which last January carried an ad for an Ayn Rand social evening at a New York City restaurant called Porter’s (the evening was to feature ‘gourmet hors d’oeuvres’ served by ‘uniformed strolling waiters’ and ‘an artistically decorated birthday cake’). Professional philosophers can join the Ayn Rand Society at ...”

“... was Jackie Kennedy, with whom Adlai Stevenson asked the cast of Beyond the Fringe to supper in New York in 1963. They went and I didn’t. Never spelling it out to myself, I clung far too long to the notion that shyness was a virtue and not, as I came too late to see, a bore. I don’t quite spill all this out to the waiting courier, who is a graduate of UCL ...”

“... be non-violent. In the 1960s Margaret Lovatt lived for six months with a young male dolphin called Peter as part of a Nasa project to teach dolphins to speak. The pair grew extremely close. Peter would often get sexually aroused and rub himself against Lovatt, disrupting their language lessons. Eventually Lovatt started to ...”

“... Martens, short hair again. Without this you could not get into clubs like the Mineshaft [in New York], where the doorman smelled you to make sure you weren’t wearing aftershave. In fact, so dark were the recesses of the Mineshaft all you could really do was touch and smell.Ah, the Mineshaft. White wrote about it in States of Desire: Through an archway is ...”

“... for depriving them of their homes.’ Under Israeli pressure, Zukerman lost his job as a New York correspondent for the London-based Jewish Chronicle. Arthur Lourie, the Israeli consul general in New York, exulted in his firing: ‘a real MITZVAH’.Zukerman wasn’t alone. In 1953, the American Reform rabbi Morris ...”

“... on the subject. A volume did appear in 1988 – English Extremists, written with Deyan Sudjic and Peter Cook, celebrating the postmodern architects Campbell Zogolovitch Wilson Gough – but since then his medium has been television. Meades has never been a fully paid-up architectural correspondent; he argues in Museum without Walls that taking up such a job ...”

“... in a fitting manner by the biggest tent show in the universe. As the Minister without Portfolio, Peter Mandelson, asserts in a document issued by the Cabinet Office: ‘millenniums only come once in a thousand years.’ Or at approximately the same interval as Labour governments with a mandate to do whatever they want, with absolutely no come-back, in the ...”

“... that, during his lifetime, his articles were dispersed. It’s only now, with the publication of Peter McDonald’s and Michael Suarez’s thoughtful edition of his selected essays, that readers can gain some sense of his reach. McKenzie read the analytical bibliography in which he’d been trained as the long-lost twin of New Criticism: both treated texts ...”

“... and subsequent correspondence from Elizabeth Wade White, another collector and supporter, and Peter Pears. Valentine introduced Craske’s pictures to her friend and occasional lover Dorothy Warren, who owned a gallery in Maddox Street (the one from which police confiscated D.H. Lawrence’s paintings when they were exhibited in July 1929): Warren was ...”

“... Group.’ When not at Ascot or at L’Ecu de France, Bernard Ingham presents himself as a bluff York-shireman, ‘an extremely awkward cuss’ with a ‘simple direct way’ of calling ‘a spade a spade’. Part of the ‘awkward cuss’ image harks back to the rough days of his youth and his early leanings towards the Labour Party. He even joined the ...”

“... relatively indifferent to the sex of the authors she’s dealing with. But in Eagleton-eyed Peter Gibbons, who wrote the chapter on non-fiction, Sturm found someone in tune with his editorial song. ‘Writing,’ Gibbons tells us, ‘like Marx’s capital, arrives in New Zealand “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and ...”