“... The hairdresser gave me this weird short haircut. Why don’t you ever take me to a gay bar? Frank utterances such as these once prompted prolonged stays in the Cave of Spleen; now I can’t be trusted to keep a straight face when reminded of them. To whom – or to what – can this salutory change be ascribed? First, foremost and for ever (blushes ...”

“... tried it closer to home at least once. On 1 August 1939 Kathleen and her friend Julia Vickers met Frank Martin, who took them driving around Charleston, West Virginia in his grey Packard convertible. At Valley Bell Dairy he bought them cheese, and at Dan’s Beer Parlor he got them pints. Kathleen said they ought to rent a room somewhere; it would cost ...”

“... of Roosevelt, Black draws on the work of pioneering scholars such as William Leuchtenburg, Frank Freidel and Arthur Schlesinger, but he also incorporates a large amount of original material from the Roosevelt Library. And although Black credits a number of research assistants, the argument bears his personal stamp. For FDR, somewhat improbably, turns ...”

“... a return to the historic quartier as the basis of urban planning in Europe; on the other side were Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, who embraced the commercial strip (‘billboards are almost all right,’ they proclaimed in 1972 in Learning from Las Vegas, a manifesto to which Delirious New York is an indirect riposte). Koolhaas could ...”

“... what he called ‘the wolf’ at bay until 1877, when he met a ‘strapping young soldier with … frank eyes and a pleasant smile’ in a male brothel in London. He was intrigued by the fact that his partner seemed to feel no guilt. As a socialist Carpenter followed no party line; he had been more affected by the writings of Thoreau and, indeed, Whitman about ...”

“... to revise and correct the pages. When he was released, Wilde gave the manuscript to his friend Robert Ross, who had two copies made. He sent one to Lord Alfred Douglas; the other he later lodged in the British Museum. Sections from Ross’s copy were published in 1905 and in 1908. The complete version, based on the original manuscript, wasn’t published ...”

“... him the first issue of the Black Mountain Review and introduced him to the work of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Motherwell, Cy Twombly and Ray Johnson.Opinion is divided about his appearance. ‘He thought of himself as ugly,’ a boyfriend from the early 1960s said. ‘But when you saw Andy naked, he looked ...”

“... makes the scene even more touching. 6 February. I am reading a history of the Yorkshire Dales by Robert White, one of a series, Landscape through Time, published by English Heritage. During the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1809 John Hulton used the land allotted to him from the ...”

“... tries to rise to as a correspondent, giving exquisite elegies for old friends like Mrs Kemble and Robert Louis Stevenson; even the noble, scrupulous and harrowing account of his loved sister’s last days and hours is improved by an altered phrase. Some things probably came near to defeating him, though he records them desperately. Professor Edel chooses to ...”

“... dabs of kerosene light and the occasional brace of headlights showed a city was there at all. Robert, an Armenian PE teacher who had befriended me in the coupé, took me through the frosty murk of Yerevan’s central station and into a doorway. In an instant there was light, power, a swift transaction involving tokens, a set of escalators, and at their ...”

“... the best in the country, and education – including that offered at a nautical school run by Robert Burns’s friend David Sillar – was counted high. There was suddenly a book shop, Templeton’s in the High Street, and newspapers from London, along with the hot political and literary journals of the day. In a flash, Irvine became a town that was part ...”

“... thinking, one that might see America as a portion of Latin America (in the manner of Waldo Frank), or could allow such literature its own language-ethos – which, because it is so deliberate, even extravagant, drives us towards a new anatomy, to echo Hart Crane. Nothing in Leavis’s ‘heuristico-creative’ stance compels such lack of ...”

“... of the music into the life which is most damaging to the music. Hence, Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge reflects ‘all the conflicting states of mind Britten was experiencing while he composed it’, even down to his ‘delight in discovering the Suffolk countryside’ ‘Peter Grimes becomes Britten’s dream of what he might be like if he abandoned ...”

“... putting huge strains on social insurance funds and local government. Schröder’s staff, led by Frank-Walter Steinmeier, later foreign minister and now president of Germany, worked with think tanks such as the Bertelsmann Stiftung, and labour experts such as Peter Hartz (the later disgraced HR boss of VW), to devise a new model of labour market management ...”

“... and arguably fending off recession. Second, along with the Clinton-era Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, he successfully lobbied for deregulation of the credit industry, including the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated investment banks from commercial banks. At the same time he blocked attempts to subject over the ...”