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“... of them, who survived long enough to tell and tell again the shocking truth, for example, that Elizabeth Arden, one of the world’s richest women, lined the inside of her shoes with newspaper, or that Helena Rubinstein’s lawyer chose ‘the budget option’ at the funeral parlour after her death until wiser counsel prevailed, or that Diana Vreeland’s ...”

“... on her first voyage. In 1940, stealthily, in time for trooping duties, there arrived the Queen Elizabeth (the name which, many thought, should have gone to the Queen Mary). If Winston Churchill was right, the two Queens, by virtue of their speed and ability to carry 15,000 men each, shortened the war by about a year. That much admired high prow of the ...”

“... poetic abstracted from vulgar congregational performance – he likes John Byrom and Christopher Smart, whose greatest successes, as Davie sees it, were not pointed towards the actual singing of current congregations. Some poems which have been highly successful as sung works in congregations – of the past and sometimes of the present – seem to him ...”

“... to Present an Exhibition of Capable Artworks by the Notable Hand of the Celebrated American, Kara Elizabeth Walker, Negress. This is very much the artist’s trademark, flouting the pieties which in her view conceal modern-day realities. The work of more recent historians of the Civil War and the plantations also inspires her later polemical fictions on the ...”

“... overheated version of Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), Clift lets the women take centre-stage; it’s Elizabeth Taylor’s film, then Katharine Hepburn’s. Here, as in Freud, he’s a ‘listener’. Of all the early films, it’s in the last, Vittorio De Sica’s excellent (though butchered) Indiscretion of an American Wife (1953) that Clift takes the greatest ...”

“... Keys – but as he started to film 92 in the Shade he was into a freefall passion with the actress Elizabeth Ashley. As if a space had become free, one of the film’s stars, Warren Oates, had a fling with Becky, though she ended up marrying its other star, Peter Fonda. And then McGuane saw Margot Kidder. It’s like a libertarian Bonnie and Clyde – ‘we ...”

“... during the Queen’s visit to South Africa, about black radio commentators who talked of ‘Queen Elizabeth Eleven’ and her husband, the ‘Duke of Ellington’. The people who told you the stories were always white and they had never heard the commentator themselves; either ‘a friend’ had, or they’d ‘heard’ that it had happened, thus confirming ...”

“... I first knew the Marais in the late Forties it was shabby, almost a slum. Now it is packed with smart boutiques and galleries, and an expensive district to live in. At 4.30 crowds of strollers everywhere: kerbside stalls for snacks, bric-à-brac, sacs-à-main, carpets. Found the old café-tabac at the corner of the place des Vosges that I used to drop into ...”

“... scheme. Belgrave Road was not a great success. Victoria was too far off the beaten track of the smart set, so she moved to South Audley Street, Mayfair, in 1934. Already, according to Vogue, ‘one of the essential figures behind the scenes of social life’, Spry now stepped into the limelight. In 1935 she got her first royal commission, for the wedding of ...”

“... asked all the time what my Total Quality Statement was. I’d say: “To run clean lorries, with smart drivers who arrive on time at your factory.” What more is there to say?’ Davies’s Stobart is difficult to dislike, but there are suggestions, in the book and elsewhere, that he may be quite a hard man. Thus: ‘Only two drivers out of some two hundred ...”

“... of his life. He had affairs again at Harvard, where he went in 1932. But he came to agree with Elizabeth Boody, an economic historian whom he met there soon after he arrived, that he’d come to lead ‘a ridiculous life’. In 1937, they married, and she sustained him. He died in her country house in Connecticut in 1950. As an economist, his reputation ...”

“... plot is taken from Knut Hamsun’s novel Pan, to which Fante was introduced by his sometime agent Elizabeth Nowell in 1936. The title comes from a passage in which Hamsun’s narrator compresses the story of his doomed love affairs into a fable about a ‘lord’ who loves two women – a compliant ‘maid’ and ‘another’: This other he loved as a ...”

“... In April​ 1970, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick – both aged 53, married for 21 years – had just been on holiday together in Italy with their 13-year-old daughter, Harriet. Hardwick and Harriet had come home to New York, where Hardwick taught at Barnard College; Lowell had gone to Oxford to take up a fellowship at All Souls ...”

“... process and not so simple larceny. Between process and, oh – just ‘write it!’ (to quote Elizabeth Bishop) – plagiarism. The answer, by way of explanation for which I offer the following narrative (or confession), is ‘no.’ Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that all such confessions are deceptive. To quote J.D. Salinger ...”

“... in the opposite direction. Mathews hears this story of his own peregrinations from the ‘pretty, smart, thrillingly cool’ twentysomething Marie-Claude Podopoulos, the daughter of an eminent cardiologist; she is intrigued. ‘So, my darling, what are you up to?’ There is a simple answer, involving an exhibition opening that turned out to have been ...”