“... in Anglo-American culture. A canon that includes Pessoa seems infinitely less claustrophobic and bossy. There is, Pessoa writes in The Book of Disquietude, ‘no better étude or melody for me than the lightly moonlit moment in which I don’t know myself as knowable’. Though a source of dismay to him – self-knowledge is, after all, the traditional ...”

“... of my childhood. 10 February. Finish with some regret Frances Spalding’s book on the Pipers, John and Myfanwy, the latter figuring in The Habit of Art where she is to some extent disparaged. I’ve always been in two minds about Piper, liking him when I was young with his paintings ‘modern’ but representational enough to be acceptable, a view I ...”

“... predictable Tory attitudes – disparagement of the welfare state, of long-haired young men: ‘John Lennon so repellent-looking now’ – taking swipes at student politics and much else. Larkin became a regular correspondent and an ally, though her views were never as rancorous as his. Her lacklustre campus novel, An Academic Question, with its depressed ...”

“... support in her lifetime. She has written a good book about her: one which is firm, sometimes quite bossy, about Mew’s work and views, and which doesn’t snuggle up to her feelings. It is also a wispy book, which doesn’t try to reconstruct her subject’s daily life, but darts between interesting episodes, often focused on an influential friend. In doing ...”

“... for musical chairs, because there was no chance that she would be converted to his politics. Bossy, wildly opinionated, a great finger-jabber and tongue-lasher, she was always the one doing the converting at Astor parties, attempting to force guests to a common ground whether they liked it or not. On meeting Gandhi, she clapped her hands in his ...”

“... Francesco was almost perpetually away on business, and his letters are often just a long bossy list of reminders. ‘Remember to wash the mule’s feet with hot water, down to her hooves,’ to ‘have my hose made and then soled’, to ‘give some of the millet that is left with you to the nag, and see that it is well-mashed’, to ‘water the ...”

“... a fact he doesn’t mention in his account of the incident in his memoirs or even in his diary. John McCloy, FDR’s assistant secretary of war, described it as ‘the most gallant thing I’ve ever seen’. Macmillan wasn’t one of those not infrequent war heroes who in peacetime are mild and eager to please. He remained dauntless and daunting in ...”

“... other accounts. Sorrentino’s A Life of Fire is a quieter book, faithful to the record, free of bossy instruction to the reader on what to think or feel. The portrait that emerges is familiar from the personal histories of writers: early years of not quite fitting in, watchful interest in the doings of grown-ups, some remarkable utterance, eventually words ...”

“... has never been a travel poster like Harmonium,’ Randall Jarrell said; ‘He mutter spiffy,’ John Berryman (or Henry) wrote approvingly in The Dream Songs. But Stevens lived in the North even as he wrote raptly and rapturously about the South; while writing colourful poems he made his living writing colourless, transactional letters. He too once wanted ...”

“... your love you take their shit forever’, and she could fairly be described as querulous, nosy and bossy. But that would be to miss the warmth these traits do nothing to disguise; some sourness is necessary to make the sweetness palatable. Possibly Jewish herself, Nina considers Ned, in his gentleness, ‘a sort of Jesus’: ‘So far as she knew, he had never ...”

“... Years later, when much cream had been spread and rouge faded and money spent, figures such as John Richardson, Graham Sutherland and Bruce Chatwin would have dealings with Helena Rubinstein. Rubinstein trusted Richardson, in as much as she trusted anyone, because he told her that certain paintings in her vast art collection that she believed were ...”

“... 1505, she grew up, probably, on her father’s estates in Essex. Jane’s mother was Alice St John, daughter of a Bedfordshire landowner. Her father was Henry, Lord Morley, the scholarly translator of Petrarch and Plutarch. David Starkey begins an essay on Lord Morley by wondering whether we should class him like Prufrock as an ‘attendant ...”

“... foreigner in crumpled battledress. He came to know Spender, Orwell, MacNeice, Philip Toynbee and John Lehmann, and was invited to their parties. The Tribune left-wingers adored him; Michael Foot (as he put it himself) ‘fell an immediate swooning victim to his wit, charm and inordinate capacity for alcohol’, and to his murderous style of ...”

“... Hellman perambulates the house like an elderly Mother of Frankenstein, oscillating between bossy tantrums, purblind inanities and a near-total indifference to the sensibilities of her youthful factotum. (When not in a senile rage over Mahoney’s deficiencies as a servant – the tomboyish Mahoney is unable to cook anything more than boiled eggs, for ...”

“... snaggle-toothed performances. In Jacob Slovak (1923), the one de Acosta play to have some success (John Gielgud appeared in a short-lived London production), Mercedes again depicted doomed heterosexual love. The heroine is a New England village girl who has a clandestine affair with her shopkeeper father’s Jewish assistant. (The drama was meant to be an ...”