“... and Agates. Miller’s suspicion was strengthened by reading some remarks made by Dame Helen Gardner, ‘one of Eliot’s most distinguished sponsors’. She had remembered some good stage performances she had seen before 1960 – with ‘extremely beautiful costumes by a firm called Motley’ – but she claimed she could hardly remember the names of ...”

“... Harrison’s subversive, utterly anti-Whiggish suggestion, drawing on recent research by Dr Philip Gardner, that the working-class private-venture schools of the mid-19th century, the notorious ‘dame schools’ denounced by middle-class reformers, were better institutions (if we take the common person’s point of view as our standard of ‘good’) than the ...”

“... whether of Marilyn or of other women whose look set the standards of glamour in that decade: Ava Gardner, Judy Garland, Audrey Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly, Anita Ekberg, and models such as Lisa Fonssagrives or Suzy Parker. It is a look now coming back into fashion, probably because it owes more to art than nature. These faces are the most perfect ...”

“... Themas – an anagram of the formula ‘Mathematical Games’ used by his predecessor Martin Gardner, but also referring to the ‘metamathematics’ rooted in Gödel’s discovery. These columns are now collected together in this new book. But there is more to it than this, not only because of its new postscripts, but also because it embraces some seven ...”

“... and Life magazine not only brings Bruegel into the scene, it shows a picture of Sinatra with Ava Gardner. All this stuff has fallen indelibly into the past, but DeLillo retrieves it by the sheer energy and movement of his prose, and his shifts of angle, and by threading into the story of the game – the Giants are losing, it seems they cannot win, they win ...”

“... Layard, helped to establish a collection of historic Venetian glass on Murano; and above all when John Charles Robinson bought ceramics, metalwork, glass and textiles from Venice for South Kensington, the ‘products of the artisan’ were receiving plenty of ‘serious scholarly attention’. As for the ‘full social and historical context’, that was ...”

“... noir, so I came to Bogart (as to Cagney, Raft, Edward G., Stanwyck, Hayworth, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Gloria Grahame) retrospectively and as a ready-made – I think I need to use the word – icon. They were vast beings moving across the screen, on prints patinated with the time that had passed. The women were beautiful in a glamorously dated way, but ...”

“... Boston, devouring and copying the treasures in the Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, even getting a little basic training at night from the New School of Design. Later he would promulgate more lies about having studied at the more prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, or graduated from Brown University. Daily life remained ...”

“... have written a more guarded sentence. A similar abrupt confidence (which reminds me of Dame Helen Gardner) marks her observation that Miranda’s strangely violent language to Caliban in The Tempest has nothing to do with sexual repression on the island but is, in fact, detached from the character of Miranda, mere impersonal poetic affirmation of the theme of ...”

“... one Sinatra’s name was often linked with. Consider the following, from Cosa Nostra (2004), John Dickie’s history of the Sicilian Mafia: ‘Anyone who was worthy of being described as mafioso therefore had a certain something, an attribute called “mafia”. “Cool” is about the closest modern English equivalent.’ Discourse among ‘men of ...”

“... men so beguiled by Bette Davis?’ Yeah, Ben, what gives? Roth: ‘You don’t look twice at Ava Gardner, who was, to put it mildly, more attractive. She had an enduring sexiness, even in London. In the 1980s. When I had her.’ When I had her: how the phrase just rolls off the wrist. Memories of Ava weren’t enough to warm Roth on winter nights, as the ...”

“... Smith Institute for the Criminally Insane, banging the same drum in the Independent. Not long ago John Bird and John Fortune did a sketch about the privatisation of air. These days it scarcely seems unthinkable. 28 February. There have been football riots in Bruges, where Chelsea have been playing, with, responsible for ...”

“... the difference between ‘beige’ and ‘bone’ at fifty yards that made her a natural diarist. John Updike said her ‘Talk of the Town’ pieces ‘helped put New York back into the New Yorker’. Her first column, in January 1954, was about a careless dry cleaner, and began the dispatches from ‘a rather long-winded lady’ whom the New Yorker heard ...”

“... military and the armaments manufacturers and it is not new. I am reading Alabaster Tombs by Arthur Gardner who, discussing the representations of 15th-century armour on church monuments, writes: ‘It is recorded that after a battle the squires and armourers held a sort of inquest over the bodies of the slain in order to discuss how best to prevent or ward off ...”

“... was homosexual.’ Thirty years later, when Eliot’s prestige and influence were at their zenith, John Peter, a Canadian academic, published an article in Essays in Criticism called ‘A New Interpretation of The Waste Land’. Peter argued that the poem was at heart an elegy that might be compared to Tennyson’s In Memoriam: ‘At some previous time the ...”