“... At the age of 71, in 1943, he told a version of the same story to the writer Ella Winter in New York, bringing out pictures of chrysanthemums and trees, ‘old pencil and ink drawings of decades ago’, to demonstrate how far he had come. In the essays he wrote about the theoretical underpinnings of his art and its place in modern culture, he made it seem ...”

“... Sontag magnetised the camera her entire career, a watchful muse and Medusa starer in portraits by Peter Hujar (whose photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly ...”

“... editions by New Directions and never exhibited on a bookstore counter.’ When he returned to New York, Williams told a friend: ‘It wasn’t the Arabs I was afraid of while I was in Tangier; it was Paul Bowles, whose chilling stories filled me with horror.’ ‘The Delicate Prey’ was published in Tangier a few weeks after it was written, in a magazine ...”

“... reading matter, the titles she was happy to display. Alan Bennett’s Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third ...”

“... departed hand in hand; I had been reading too much John Hoyer Updike. In a 1997 review for the New York Observer, the recently kinged David Foster Wallace diagnosed how far Updike had fallen in the esteem of a younger generation. ‘Penis with a thesaurus’ is the phrase that lives on, though it is not the levelling blow it first appears; one feels oddly ...”

“... wanted the voice. After the Bon Soir there were gigs in nightclubs in Detroit, St Louis and New York, as well as her first television appearance. She dropped the middle ‘a’ from ‘Barbara’.The praise was endless. Marty Erlichman, who would become her agent, saw her perform at the Bon Soir and came to see her backstage. ‘I have the feeling you’re ...”

“... relaunch of the series in America. Two years later O’Brian was on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, and by the time he turned eighty his sales were ticking up into the millions. Soon he was being invited to movie premieres by Charlton Heston, given a tour of a US warship followed by lunch at the Pentagon, and ushered into a banquet in ...”

“... not least on the Barclays’ home turf of West London, where the slumlord turned property mogul Peter Rachman was making his fortune. The brothers set up an estate agency in Notting Hill. One day a woman came in looking to move to a particular street in the neighbourhood so that she could be near her elderly father. Frederick showed her a small house on the ...”

“... image perhaps best represented by her most visible legacy, the Hall of the Pacific Peoples in New York, where her red cape and walking stick are preserved in a glass case, across from the display of dog and horse gear used by the Blackfoot Indians. Since her death in 1978, Mead’s reputation has foundered. In the 1980s, Derek Freeman, a right-wing Australian ...”

“... his correspondence with Simon and Schuster. Thelma Toole thereafter always maintained that the New York publishers (more particularly, that ‘Jewish creature’, Gottlieb) had effectively murdered her son by first raising then dashing his hopes. More than one commentator has hinted that John’s relationship with his overwhelming mother may have had something ...”

“... era of Colin Davis (1971-86). Things, indeed, began to fall apart when Davis’s partnerships with Peter Hall and Götz Friedrich broke down. Tooley dutifully chronicles the years from 1947 to 1988, but only comes alive in his final 80 pages, with a disgruntled assessment of his successor. Isaacs for his part is critical, if not harshly so, of Tooley. He ...”

“... in order ‘to protect the mainland’. McCartney has campaigned vociferously with Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson against the Agreement – in April, at the launch of the United Unionist campaign, he gave the clenched fist salute – and though most people regard him as a provincial politician, his policy of trying to make Northern Ireland permanently part of ...”

“... study of the French Resistance. It also prepares the reader for the full transcription of Peter the Great’s Testament as an appendix to the novel, and warns us that we have narrowly avoided getting the Protocols of Zion’ into the bargain. What is the function of this mythic sounding-board to contemporary history? In a sense, the answer could be ...”

“... with plans, some fulfilled and some not, for free clinics in Zagreb, Moscow, Frankfurt, New York, Trieste and Paris.’ But were these clinics as successful as Danto suggests? They were certainly besieged by patients: ‘Our work,’ Eitingon wrote to Freud in 1923, ‘needs more and more space.’ (Finding space was difficult because of the postwar ...”

“... a vivid makeover of a 14th-century acquaintance of Chaucer. I learned about the first from a New York Times review of Hermione Lee’s 1997 biography of Virginia Woolf. In the midst of Daphne Merkin’s somewhat dutiful praise there erupts a moment of real excitement: Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf, by Panthea Reid, while not nearly as strong as ...”