“... Cartier-Bresson. He flirted with the idea of moving to New York, after falling in love with Sara Elizabeth Penn, a glamorous Black expatriate he met at a party. In 1957, Penn returned to New York, and waited for him to arrive.He never did. Late that year, he received a visit from Annette Roger, a doctor from Marseille who was active in the porteurs de ...”

“... correspondent, the role of chief Hollywood inquisitor was assumed by the more combative Julia Elizabeth Baxter. Ellen Scott’s researches in the NAACP archive have revealed that Baxter paid greater attention than White had to the racial caricature latent in cinema’s visual and verbal detail. It would be interesting to know what she made of the ...”

“... arguing that the revisers’ refusal to admit any references to the Church Militant, God as man or king, or spiritual strife (militancy again), goes hand in hand with the tenets and practices of deconstruction, since it is deconstruction which sanctions disregard for historical and authorial authenticity, and hence allows the revisers to perform their ...”

“... TV, and was re-released in the cinema to coincide with Welles’s return to the Broadway stage as King Lear. In America especially, the era of the art-house, the film-society circuit, film magazines and film schools began. Andrew Sarris launched the cult of the auteur. His key thesis was Citizen Kane: The American Baroque, in which he described Kane as ‘the ...”

“... Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, or Danny Hill: Memoirs of a Prominent Gentleman (edited by Francis King) and Margaret Forster’s ‘edition’ of Thackeray’s Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman, the book mingled respected literary figures still alive in Britain with private characters who, if not invented, were surely concealed like the author himself under ...”

“... You will eat ‘like a prince or princess’, or, raising the social stakes, ‘like a king or queen’. On the cover of the British edition of the New Diet Revolution, Nigella Lawson endorses Atkins as ‘the perfect diet for those who love food’. As an Atkins dieter, you will ‘eat as much as you want, as often as you want’; you will eat ...”

“... courtier, eager to win honour and wealth not available in the Basque country by service in the king of Spain’s entourage. Once Loyola’s plans for the Society of Jesus took shape, they were made possible by his courtier’s sense of how to charm and persuade the powerful to look favourably on his vision: not least his skill in influencing noble ladies ...”

“... person in a civilised country’ had at their disposal better stuff than ‘many an African king, the absolute masters of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages’. Civilisation itself consisted in the miracle of specialisation. Smith was far less interested in what the division of labour looked like in practice. His breezy lists of ...”

“... draws inspiration from 18th-century and Romantic writers: a verse recipe in the manner of William King, 21 ‘Vignettes’ based on engravings by Thomas Bewick, and some distinctly Wordsworthian landscape poems feature in his collection. But where Clampitt hops about dottily – despite the decorous appearance of her stanzas – snatching at bits of Keats and ...”

“... appearance – was pleased when John Holms told her she looked like ‘a something Queen Elizabeth’. The missing adjective was ‘Surbiton’, which she would not have liked, though she was capable of accepting far crueller truths about herself than most people could dream up for her. She didn’t doubt the doctor who told her she had the nature of ...”

“... that liberty which you have defended’, arguing that Cromwell ought not to assume the title of king, because actions such as his are lost in clouds like ‘the points of pyramids’. Later, Satan in Paradise Lost is shown raised on a mount ‘with pyramids and towers’. It may be that the connection with Milton is a coincidence, but I cannot think that ...”

“... or should they make us notice the artistry of the many pages scribbled in airports? In a review of Elizabeth Bishop’s letters, Heaney’s Field Day colleague Tom Paulin argued that ‘a poetics does operate when we read a letter,’ but that ‘the gifted correspondent has to appear negligent of effect.’ What successful letters show is ‘a rejection of ...”

“... at it like rabbits the night after they exchanged vows? The Dukes of Burgundy and of Orléans? King Malcolm and Earl Tostig? Probably not, but who knows? At the other end of the timescale, Anne Lister certainly did do it with the woman she exchanged rings with, as previously with her intended from whom she caught a venereal disease: gotcha! Returning to ...”

“... in clogs and woollen skirt’ who took up arms and walked out fearlessly to confront her king and restore him to his throne. One of the many verses goes: Fiers enfants de la Lorraine Des montagnes à la plaine, Sur nous, plane ombre sereine, Jeanne d’Arc, vierge souveraine! Marjorie Annan Bryce in a Suffragette procession to mark George V’s ...”

“... poets: Lowell, Berryman, Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop and Theodore Roethke. The last two were more peripheral, both less overtly confessional, especially Bishop, and not so much on the scene, New York or Ivy League (though Bishop turned up briefly, and memorably, at Harvard). Their work has stood up ...”