“... 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 ...”

“... his hands and cried out: ‘Oh God, oh God.’ The accounts of the Eliots’ married life found in Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Eliot or Lyndall Gordon’s or, now, in Carole Seymour-Jones’s book may disagree about the primary cause of the failure of the marriage or the degree of Tom and Vivienne’s responsibility for it, but all of them repeat the same ...”

“... overlapped: I became fascinated, for example, with the long World War One sequence in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. I read up on butch lady ambulance-drivers at the Western Front. But the world had not yet retracted to a grey, dugout-sized, lobe-gripping monomania.Then, starting in my thirties, things seemed to intensify. I was in England ...”

“... one of the meetings held by the campaign group Housing Action Southwark and Lambeth in a community hall near Elephant and Castle. A hubbub of voices, mainly those of women and children, filled the space, speaking many languages. The attendees gathered in groups at folding tables to share their stories of homelessness and temporary accommodation, and to learn ...”

“... are a criminal . . . Jewish traitress! International agitator!’ She later wrote: ‘In the hall, everything became a mad scramble. The Stormtroopers attacked the audience with their chairs, shouting themselves into paroxysms of anger and fury.’ The Nazi newspaper later called her ‘a flatfooted peace hyena’ with ‘no human physiognomy’; she ...”

“... Charles Vaughan, chief of staff of Thiel Capital, owned by the billionaire former Trump supporter Peter Thiel, and Jordan Peterson, who was invited by Orr and other academics to be a visiting fellow at the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity in 2019. After a photo emerged of Peterson with a man wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘I’m a proud ...”

“... at some of the A-list names cropping up regularly in All We Know: Maude Adams (the first Peter Pan); the Russian film star Alla Nazimova (a teetering Salomé in the ultra-campy cinematic 1923 version of Wilde’s play); Isadora Duncan, the bisexual modern dancer; the interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe and her Broadway-producer lover Bessie ...”

“... hair.Well, I saw the poising head,But the lips moved and nothing said;And when lights were in the hall,Silent moved the dancers all.So awhile I glowed, and thenFell on dusty days and men;Long I slumbered packed in straw,Long I none but dealers saw;Till before my silent eyeOne that sees came passing by.Now with an outlandish grace,To the sparkling fire I ...”

“... then a spare bob or so to take your quean to the talkies’ – and collectivises, to ‘Will! Or Peter! Or Tam!’ when the ‘Communionists’ organise a march against the Public Assistance Committees and the men march as they haven’t marched since Ypres:You minded your time in the army, the rain and stink and that first queer time your feet slipped in a ...”

“... a more overtly political play.There may have been another play early on.A one-acter?Yes, possibly.Peter Dale told me you once produced a play at Oxford, a small piece by Harold Pinter.I had started another magazine at Oxford called Tomorrow. And for its fourth issue I’d written to Pinter. He had just become prominent then, but I’d learned about him ...”