“... Lucy; a dinner-table scene from The Waltons; Neil Armstrong’s One Small Step; the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald; the pilot show of Roseanne. Each viewer wore headphones; all you could hear was the giggles and gasps. On my little TV, where the picture was jumpy at first, was Jack Kerouac. He was sitting up at a white piano, and Steve Allen tinkled away at ...”

“... 40 trunks and ‘about 30 boxes and bags, two or three birdcages, two carriages, several cases of silver, linen etc’. Among all this stuff, the giant vases appear to have had pride of place: six feet tall and elaborately decorated in blue on white, they testified to the modish taste for Eastern things and accompanied their owners on more than a dozen ...”

“... Wintour is a devoted tennis fan and friend of Serena’s) arriving in a floor-length silver Balenciaga gown, accompanied by a phalanx of adorable ball girls, swiftly followed by a street team of BMX bikers wearing Louis Vuitton. Next came the supermodels of the last generation – Shalom Harlow, Amber Valetta, Helena Christensen – and ...”

“... the town believe that they are already the victims of an ongoing, cumulative disaster. As Judith Lee, a social worker, puts it, ‘there is no money being invested here, no jobs and no industry.’ Her caseload includes more and more people with such desperate problems as eviction, homelessness, domestic violence and debt. ‘Ten years ago, I could have done ...”

“... the lover in the lyric sequence Plain-chant (1923) to the uncanny eyes painted on the eyelids of Lee Miller in his 1930 film Le Sang d’un poète. He kept returning to the pivotal moment in the myth of Orpheus when a sudden, interlocked gaze sends Eurydice back to the unseen shades. Despite the connections, his work is remarkable for its eclecticism: he ...”

“... exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, which included Man Ray’s dreamy Lovers, showing Lee Miller’s lips floating above green hills, Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered teacup and saucer and Eileen Agar’s objets trouvés – shells, nets and pieces of rusted metal. More than a thousand people went to the opening, at which the performance artist ...”

“... patients reportedly underwent over forty surgeries without anaesthesia until Sims hit upon the silver sutures that made him rich. When chloroform was introduced into the delivery room in 1847, the Anglican Church disapproved. Chloroform, they said, was ‘a decoy of Satan, apparently offering itself to bless woman, but in the end it will harden ...”

“... time is his secret.’ Well, perhaps the critic should have tried harder to get it out of him. Lee Harwood in his afterword to Schuyler’s Last Poems enthuses about ‘poems where the poet is not an isolated heroic figure but a social creature enjoying or enduring the “ordinary” experiences of life’. Harwood doesn’t mention Lowell by name, but ...”

“... who’s white, you have to feel guilty because you’re white,’ Roberto told me. He was a silver-haired retiree waiting in line in front of me to enter the Trump rally in Portsmouth. He then launched into a version of the ‘I’m not a racist but’ formula I would hear several times over the course of five days in New Hampshire without ever raising ...”

“... she liked. They tended to be showbusiness people. She liked Robin Williams, Charlie Chaplin, Tommy Lee Jones and Al Pacino. She also liked Salinger. (‘Jerry’ had been a friend since the 1950s and Lillian could sometimes sound like a female Holden Caulfield, railing against the phonies.) She got a fine awareness of ‘the penalties of making it’ from ...”

“... has pointed out, one such upright corpse appears in his early novella The Adventures of Basil Lee, where the narrator, returning from the War of American Independence, makes landfall on Lewis, and half-sceptical of, half-fascinated by the popular superstitions of the Hebrides, spends a night in the cottage of an old woman reputed to be visited by ...”

“... than they were.’ He remembers the descriptions in a review of a Cocteau Twins album – ‘silver and roseate mists’, ‘endless ice-capped peaks’ – that helped him to hear it properly: ‘Suddenly, I had the key to the secret garden.’ If Still in a Dream strikes a melancholy note, it may have something to do with Reynolds’s fear that this ...”

“... boy and a brave, north-travelling girl. At one point the Snow Queen stormed off stage-left in her silver sledge, and had she kept going, putting a girdle round the earth, she’d have been following the 56th parallel. Up the Nethergate, out of Dundee, across Scotland, away over the North Atlantic, she’d have made landfall over Labrador, swooped over Hudson ...”

“... hangar, a thousand samples of soil excavated from the Super Sewer tunnels are studied by silver-bearded geologists.) In new flats close to construction sites where pile-drivers shape cofferdams, the continual pounding, day and night, is an intolerable acoustic burden. The cofferdams are required to detour around recovered stakes of ancient blackened ...”

“... in the uncanny whiteness. And there in the window, draped on transparent mannequins or laid on silver boxes, were some of the dazzling relics of the late Marilyn Monroe. ‘A pair of stilettos by Salvatore Ferragamo, scarlet satin, encrusted with matching rhinestones.’ There’s no place like home, I thought. ‘Estimate: $4000-6000.’ And further along ...”