“... of adulatory reviews: she was ‘in the first flight of contemporary women novelists’; the New York Times Book Review compared her favourably with Virginia Woolf; Edith Sitwell said that she and Emily Brontë were the two great woman novelists, and so on. Her career was well established even before she married Snow, and they became a significant double ...”

“... generations. A fifth study began in 2000 – the story is that it was set up at the behest of Peter Mandelson as a more enduring way of marking the millennium than a big wheel or a dome – and has been following around 20,000 children born between late 2000 and early 2002. A sixth study was planned for 2015. The Life Study was to be the biggest ...”

“... Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the book. None of these coat-brushers of genius is a household name: most publishers remain invisible. And many of Maschler’s authors weren’t household names in Britain until he published them at Jonathan ...”

“... Alamos: ‘He was no ordinary genius. Theirs was no ordinary love.’ Alan Alda played Feynman in Peter Parnell’s well-received New York stage play QED. Christopher Sykes’s BBC Horizon programmes on Feynman were popular hits, in Britain and the US. (A female letter-writer announced that she’d ‘fallen in love’ with ...”

“... Incidentally, they know you know they know you know the code.’ Peter Ustinov’s Cold War satire Romanoff and Juliet (1956) could have been about Salisbury Court, the London home in the early 1580s of the French Ambassador to the Court of Elizabeth I, Michel de Castelnau, seigneur de Mauvissière, an establishment described by John Bossy as ‘zany, convivial and leak-ridden ...”

“... two children by Wisdom; her remarriage to Gottfried Lessing and subsequent escape with their son, Peter, to England with the manuscript of The Grass Is Singing in her suitcase; and so on. But Klein is too baffled by Lessing and the choices she made, and usually too disapproving of them, to probe the connection between the life and the work. This is ...”

“... out, all knew one another well, or well enough. (Murphy and de Acosta attended the same posh New York girls’ day school; Garland and de Acosta may have had an affair.) They shared friends and lovers, or at least lovers-in-law, on occasion. (Sybille Bedford floats around in this book like a benign sapphic putto.) And though residing in different places at ...”

“... School of London had been vaguely but vigorously identified, and compared in importance to the New York School of the Forties and Fifties. The personnel weren’t new (Bacon, Freud, Auerbach, Kitaj et al), but the identification was, and such identifications are almost everything: in art everyone thinks in history-book chapter headings. At the same time, a ...”

“... brief statement of its current force, and a way of holding the whole issue before our minds, in Peter de Bolla’s book Art Matters.2 De Bolla is looking at a Barnett Newman painting (Vir Heroicus Sublimis) in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He has decided that the usual critical questions – what does this ...”

“... as I had months – almost After Casement’s arrest in 1916, Conrad wrote to John Quinn in New York: We never talked politics ... He was a good companion: but already in Africa I judged that he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don’t mean stupid. I mean that he was all emotion. By emotional force (Congo report, Putumayo etc) he made his ...”

“... with Thomas Wolfe elephantiasis, Styron sends haunted dispatches from the asphalt jungle. ‘New York is vast, hideous and strewn with the wrecks of lost and fidgeting souls.’ Unlike so many others of his word-besotted WWII-vet generation, he would retain this Old Man River rumble in prose, a purple majesty. As the titles of his books indicate – Lie Down ...”

“... in Central Park, had been nominated for an Oscar. (It played with Woody Allen’s Bananas at New York’s Baronet Theatre to brisk business.) In a giddy moment, we’d even taken out one of those bow-wow fuck-off ads in Variety thanking ‘the Industry’ for our nomination. My trajectory seemed as straight and clear as the plane’s flight path on the cabin ...”

“... as the ‘fastest woman on water’ – Britain’s premier speedboat-racer, winner of the Duke of York’s Trophy, and world-record holder in the one and a half litre class. Voraciously homosexual in private life, Carstairs dressed like a beautiful man, smoked cigars, and was pursued from race to race by a gaggle of female fans. (Sir Malcolm Campbell of ...”

“... guide to his intentions and Weltanschauung than the same words mediated by CNN anchors and New York Times columnists. He does not appear to be deranged, as his detractors insist he is. His message is plain: leave the Muslim world alone, and it will leave you alone. Kill Muslims, and they will kill you. ‘America won’t be able to leave this ordeal unless ...”

“... the reactionaries’, and there was ‘nothing to be afraid of in that word socialism’. The New York Times reported a few months later that ‘the raucous-voiced Lord Haw-Haw has taken hold among the lower classes.’ The attempt to kill propaganda by ridicule had resoundingly backfired. ‘Our English radio broadcasts are being taken with deadly ...”