“... most over-exposed recluse, amassed hundreds of hours of telephone recordings. Gottlieb quotes a passage from the tapes to demonstrate how unrevealing they are. (I believe him.)The more decisively Garbo withdrew, the fiercer the static of gossip and rumour generated by her occasional ventures into the outside world. The biographies can filter out much of ...”

“... from that day in 1955. Gennaro’s being the aboriginal aka of the Groucho Club.) With the passage of time images from the Kray scrapbooks, once seen as the harmlessly boastful trophies of a pair of Proustian parvenus, have been promoted to the status of evidence. The pickings are indeed rich for the analysts of pictorial space, the aesthetes of ...”

“... and taking her reputation into his hands. They cite as an example Mme d’Epinay and her friend Charles Duclos, the historian and Academician; and indeed some of the best pages in her Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant describe her troubled relationship with Duclos, a genial bully – diagnosed by Sainte-Beuve as a faux bonhomme – and his efforts to ...”

“... yow ledeth to the sorweful were/There as the fish in prysoun is al drye’), but Montgomerie’s passage deserves inclusion in any anthology of dying-fish literature. The intricate and attractive stanza (known to the cognoscenti as the ‘Bankis of Helicon’ stanza) probably added to the poem’s popularity, too. Modern readers are divided about ...”

“... Samuel Parr (‘the Whig Dr Johnson’), the great liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte Smith, as well as Godwin’s publisher George Robinson and a number of dissenting ministers who, largely forgotten now, were important ...”

“... need. So the wealthy Edmund Waller, who wrote panegyrics to Oliver Cromwell and then praised Charles II, is given faintish praise as a refiner of English verse. During his exile in France, Waller lived ‘with great splendour and hospitality; and from time to time amused himself with poetry, in which he sometimes speaks of the rebels, and their ...”

“... of inheritance over and above mere nationality and blood-ties, of immediacy irrespective of the passage of time, of idealism almost religious in its fervour. Such writing can never date. Its ramifications – historical, technical, stylistic – can be and have been drawn out at length; it has to be extended to cover epochs unknown to him, or alien, or ...”

“... friend Henry Fonda that he was a natural actor. Carole Lombard, who had worked with Fredric March, Charles Laughton, William Powell and John Barrymore, thought him more remarkable than any of them. On screen, his name appeared as James Stewart, and he worked hard at every detail. He was a canny businessman. Before the Second World War, he invested in a small ...”

“... in mythical Brookgate (part of the Huguenot leases), through a bombsite childhood reminiscent of Charles Crichton’s 1947 film, Hue and Cry (a Moorcock favourite), through his love for his cousin Rosie and his spiky relationship with John Barbican Begg, developer and despoiler, global media tycoon. Revelations, betrayals, shifts of ...”

“... makes ‘conscious’ that which was previously ‘unconscious’. There follows a hallucinating passage on the deep structure of the conscious, its ‘two fundamental traits’, the ‘meaning’ of its different kinds of mutton, the dangers of popularising it without understanding and ‘transposing its principles’. Revel’s own theories are equally ...”

“... London was rewarded in 1845 with an Act which allowed Jews to hold any municipal office. After the passage of this law, it was clear that only one further political Everest remained to be conquered. The admission of a professing Jew to Westminster would have occurred sooner or later: that it took place when it did, Dr Alderman writes, was due to a realisation ...”

“... from Europe than the word pillard is from billard. But the Impressions d’Afrique do mark a passage in the mind, from the familiar to the alien, conditioned by those two near, not-so-random homophones. For Roussel, billiards were real, they went with his smart milieu, they were a game to be escaped from. Black African plunderers were something ...”

“... power. It is easy to see the plausibility of Williams’s account. We need only call to mind a passage from Alan Clark’s diaries. Clark, himself a second generation fringe-Bloomsbury figure, priding himself on his ‘irreverence’, records two occasions on which he broke into tears. The first was when he shot a heron which had been attacking the fish in ...”

“... a range of poets from grand old men (Morgan, Donald Davie) to established talents in mid-career (Charles Tomlinson, Douglas Dunn) to new Best of Young British megastars (W.N. Herbert, Robert Crawford). But the fact relevant to Pound’s current standing is the one in Michael Alexander and James McGonigal’s Introduction: Sons of Ezra could not find a ...”

“... vicious satires against his betters and wound up raving; or the short, fat, gouty corrector Charles de la Motte, described as a ‘pygmy’, a ‘Lilliputian’ and ‘that little figure of papier-mâché’ by the contemporaries who hurled epithets at him with all the zest and accuracy of a literary darts team aiming at a target adorned with the face ...”