“... about her having or spending lots of money. Yet she received visits from Lord Longford (she was a friend of his grandson) and Lord Hilton (‘a distant cousin of my mother’), and had a food hamper sent from Fortnum and Mason’s. On their last visit prior to her release, her parents arrived early, and in the field next to the prison – ‘as if they were ...”

“... flashback, flash forward – are all present in these pages, and whose stars (Ava, Groucho, Andy Hardy) loom large in the mental landscape of its own cast of thousands. The novel’s first word is ‘Showtime!’ and its stars are almost all unknowns: drummers, singers, actors, writers and other Cuban heels throng its now bright, now shadowed streets ...”

“... and aphoristic. ‘Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,’ a friend said to him. ‘You are right,’ Nietzsche answered. ‘Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.’ This wouldn’t have come as news to Marshall McLuhan, Hugh Kenner’s mentor at the University of Toronto in the mid-1940s who in ...”

“... box-office appeal. From 1939 to 1941, he was the top box-office draw in Hollywood and his Andy Hardy films (sixteen of them) together grossed almost $1.9 billion worldwide. The hokey plots of most of Rooney and Garland’s movies were constructed on the understanding that he was a bigger deal than she was. In the ...”

“... Lawrence, Wittgenstein, Che Guevara, Greta Garbo, Edith Sitwell, JFK, Maria Callas, Howard Hughes, Andy Warhol, Glenn Gould, the late Princess of Wales) down to minor bog-sprites such as Eartha Kitt, Cher or Quentin Crisp. (Such lists are infinitely expandable.) What links each of these disparate individuals is a singularity so tangible as to border on the ...”

“... principled, but in practice it means that at crucial points of biographical interest, where a friend might have declared his intention to keep a confidence, or a reporter his determination to break a silence, Shelton flinches and fudges, or resorts to an opaque defensiveness. Here he is on the break-up of Dylan’s marriage: ‘Must I record it here for ...”

“... later. But neither that event, nor the passing of time, mellowed his judgment: in 1943 he told his friend and future literary executor, the critic Jean Paulhan, that it was ‘the least successful work painted by Signac’. Worse for Fénéon, it established a template of profilism. Bonnard, Vuillard and Vallotton all depicted him in more or less the same ...”

“... and became, in her twenties, an important personality in Washington society. Her main male friend outside her collapsing marriage was the Ambassador in Washington of the new Fascist regime in Italy, Prince Gelasio Caetani, an attractive and powerful propagandist for Mussolini. While still friendly with Caetani, Wallis forged even closer bonds with ...”

“... fictional world, this last gasp of the emperor-obsessed samurai spirit registers as an Andy Warhol moment – depthless, barely penetrating the rock and roll soundtrack.Partly because of this cool, iconoclastic attitude, Murakami’s books are wildly popular with younger Japanese readers – Norwegian Wood (1987), a realistic coming-of-age story ...”

“... cladding that burned like a torch on towers where people live, as if nobody needs affordable flats.Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester – which covers the city of Manchester and the boroughs of Wigan, Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Salford, Trafford, Tameside, Stockport and Rochdale – made the housing crisis central to his re-election campaign in ...”

“... a term Waller wouldn’t have used.As singers and jazz entertainers, Waller and his good friend Armstrong often had to modify or tear apart and rebuild inferior Tin Pan Alley material in a manner analogous to the ways in which Modernists such as Picasso begot paper collage, wood assemblage and metal sculpture. ‘I’m king of the ...”

“... tone between the lines.’ ‘Better than Tennyson,’ he says of Wordsworth to a sceptical friend; ‘you have to give me that.’ He absorbed many un-American idioms, and a respect for Aston Villa, while serving overseas. In Persuader he taunts a psychopathic giant by calling him ‘a big girl’s blouse’ – ‘a term of abuse I had picked up ...”

“... player, and I could not have borne to feel that you no longer wanted to know me or look on me as a friend. Strange are the ways of experience – but you know that better than anyone – and I hope that you will believe that I have learned some truth, however bitterly, along with a wonder at the intrinsic fairness of human beings even in bad times. So much ...”

“... till Karen showed up. Usually, she arrived mid-afternoon, after a trawl round the shops with her friend Gail; because she was married, she didn’t sit with me, but we had evolved a Byzantine system of signs and prompts that allowed us to communicate across the room, a system that, nine times out of ten, was effective enough that, when the moment was ...”

“... Sebastiano Ricci was even reported to have told his patron, the Duke of Portland, that his friend Nicola Cassano had made forgeries for this very reason. Another Venetian painter working in the first half of the 18th century, Antonio Guardi, was employed by one of the greatest collectors in Europe, Johann Matthias von der Schulenburg, to make copies of ...”