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“... mid-rank demigods and unicorn-people (T.E. 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 ...”

“... and the Cité musicale de la Villette, the Opéra Bastille and the Zénith, a large concert hall, were commissioned; the Musée Picasso was opened at the Hôtel Sale and the grand projet for the renovation of the Louvre was launched. The franc came under attack as soon as the socialists took power and in March 1983, two years – and several ...”

“... eleven of her most popular illustrated tales, including Jeremy Fisher and The Flopsy Bunnies, and Edith Nesbit, who had more or less invented the children’s adventure story, published The Railway Children. Nesbit’s work was shaped by memories of her unhappy childhood and in her novels the cheerful Bastable children offer readers some compensation for the ...”

“... women novelists’; the New York Times Book Review compared her favourably with Virginia Woolf; Edith Sitwell said that she and Emily Brontë were the two great woman novelists, and so on. Her career was well established even before she married Snow, and they became a significant double act, acclaiming each other’s masterpieces; for decades she was a ...”

“... in an antique shop before going round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less perilous, I would have ...”

“... which I suppose was handy for the courts, still functioning across the road in the town hall with the whole complex – town hall, library, courts – an expression of the confidence of the city and its belief in the value of reading and education, and where you might end up if they were neglected. It’s a High ...”

“... embroiled in a scandal, a court case over the costs of the house he’d built for the physician Edith Farnsworth, sixty miles south-west of Chicago. It is rumoured that they had an affair, which may have coloured their spectacular falling out and the resulting court case (from which Schulze and Windhorst have discovered transcripts). The Farnsworth ...”

“... announced, ‘the crowd rose as the most famous man on earth made his way down to the front of the hall.’ Only Fidel Castro and the pope, he remarks, were missing from the list of ‘superstars’ who might have been there. How did a novelist, even a Nobel Prize-winning and bestselling one, come to occupy such a position? Was it testimony to the power of ...”

“... pictures do not commemorate great thoughts or deeds, or render nature in the poetry of landscape, hall, or hut, but are of one voluptuous cast – mere shows of form and colour – and no more? Is it that the books have all their gold outside, and that the titles of the greater part qualify them to be companions of the prints and pictures? Is it that the ...”

“... at least sort of. In August 2008 we managed to sneak in and tie the knot at San Francisco City Hall during the very brief legal window that opened in May that year (after the California Supreme Court ruled that the existing state ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional) and ended – abruptly – in November, when Proposition 8, a rogue right-wing ...”

“... never-never land of Peter Ackroyd’s English Music. He shares with Ackroyd a love of music-hall, or its wilder sibling, the Punch and Judy show. On one level, that is what A Perfect Execution is. An exhibition in a tent or a glass box at the end of the pier. Pantomime horror, like the female hanging that opens Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse ...”

“... the cast crowded into his dressing room bearing flowers. He rang up the grande dame of the theatre Edith Evans, with whom he was having one of his rare heterosexual affairs, to say how happy he was: ‘God bless Rachel and Vanessa always.’ He then celebrated some more at Le Moulin d’Or in Soho before repairing to ...”

“... literary career comes with its own creation myth. He had been making no headway until in 1956 Edith Sitwell read a privately printed book of his stories and, ravished, threw herself into finding him a publisher and an audience. In one version of the event, Don’t Call Me by My Right Name, the book Purdy sent from America to Italy, made the last stage of ...”

“... and Letty and all Jump and skip and caper and brawl     Frisk in the drawing-room, romp in the hall, Susan and Charlotte and Letty and all.     Hark! the fiddle each gay spirit moves; See, the beaux have all drawn on their gloves.    Mr Archer will dance,    And Jack Hobland will prance,    And Jack Shirley’ll advance,    If my Lady ...”

“... left-wing outliers like Tony Benn, Eric Hobsbawm, Arthur Scargill, John Pilger and Stuart Hall. She set about coaxing – and sometimes wrestling – as much emotion and revelation from her castaways as she could, using the unthreatening stimulus of music, and the intimacy created by two people in a dingy little radio studio. She tried to ensure ...”