“... his son, hated talking about himself, didn’t smoke much after the cigars of middle age, and I don’t know about the balling, or the eggs, which Auden says are the test of bad biography.But there are bad biographies that tell you nothing about their subject’s breakfast preferences, and The Whole Harmonium is one such. Stevens is one of those apparently ...”

“... overwhelming majority of US forces felt a cultural disdain for Vietnam’s inhabitants. Draftee Don Graham, the son of the owner of the Washington Post, spoke of ‘the unanimous feeling of contempt for Vietnamese soldiers among Americans’. ‘I saw men who behaved with great compassion towards the Vietnamese one day,’ Phil Caputo wrote, ‘and then ...”

“... Unsurprisingly, this left my mother perpetually anxious lest we catch it. Mrs Sherwood was a good cook and often invited my brother and me to sample her dishes, which we were strictly forbidden to do. On one occasion, though, I succumbed (Yorkshire pudding) and foolishly saying so at home it was as if I’d signed my own death warrant.TB was to blame for ...”

“... field in exactly the same fashion as the horses. No one else has noted the coincidence, but then I don’t imagine there are many people so sad as to be watching the now rather aged Dick Van Dyke at half past one in the afternoon.15 February. Not having a book on the go I take up again Larkin’s Letters to Monica which I’d tried to read when it first came ...”

“... to find out the identity of the culprits, the crime frequently described as ‘unimaginable’. I don’t find it hard to imagine at all. When I was eight or nine I used to play torture games with two other boys at my elementary school up on the recreation ground in Armley. I would pretend to whip them or they me and with a forwardness that I never afterwards ...”

“... Bedford through Mexico for her first book, The Sudden View (1953; since renamed A Visit to Don Otavio) was herself acclaimed, in her own circles, as a polymath and raconteuse. The story of Murphy’s talents, and how thoroughly she soused them, is told in Cohen’s marvellous All We Know: Three Lives (2012), through which, as Terry Castle ...”

“... twosome of Erika and Klaus Mann. Although Erika played the part of Queen Elisabeth in Schiller’s Don Carlos at the State Theatre in Munich, she longed for greater excitement. And since Klaus was bored and his next play a flop, they decided to go to America, where they were ready to have their genius fully recognised. To amuse themselves, they told the US ...”

“... eyes, before deciding to move in together.Ahalf-century​ on from the band’s messy divorce, you don’t have to go searching for Beatles bumpf: it’s everywhere. They’re as much a part of the public conversation as they ever were. Here is an incomplete log of Beatles sightings I kept as 2020 tiptoed hesitantly into 2021: in a Pierre Cardin obituary; in a ...”

“... wrong. 25 April. Keep being rung by journalists asking how I intend to vote, information which I don’t divulge not because I’ve got any principled notions to do with the secret ballot but because I like disappointing newspapers. If I were a voter in the Blackburn constituency my vote would go to Craig Murray, the ex-ambassador to Uzbekistan, who resigned ...”

“... consequences to the many poor wretches who acted the Sancho Panza to his more than idiotic Don Quixote’. Slowly and without much difficulty, the British infiltrated his organisation. Nonetheless, the movement to bomb Britain continued sporadically over the next few years. Its culmination was Dynamite Saturday in January 1885, noted by James in ...”

“... best friends from back home and they talked about facts. Who you love is a fact and the meals you cook are facts. When the sun shines it is a fact of God and England is a fact of life. Rania always said she had preferred living in Mile End because the markets were better over there, but at least Westfield was near her now in White City. She was 31. ‘I was ...”