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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Roots of War, published by the Hogarth Press in the same year, took this line). As Hermione Lee pointed out in her biography of Woolf, Three Guineas reiterates much of the debate over peace and war which split the Left in the mid-1930s, but whose complexity, it might be added, has disappeared beneath the weight of that derogatory ...”

“... and Miller was relieved of duties, the position now open for a more experienced hand. Hermione Lee, then at work on her biography of Penelope Fitzgerald, was invited to be Miller’s successor, but had to decline, sparing herself no end of eventual aggravation.Into this vacancy the editor and biographer James Atlas tentatively ventured. He had made his ...”

“... career was built on a false legend, he now tells the truth. The vicious bandit Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) personifies savage violence, which the Western characteristically counters with the hero’s measured, civilised violence. Such is the legend of Ransom Stoddard as the man who shot Liberty Valance. But the senator reveals that, when he bravely faced ...”

“... charge of the whole production, you wonder, and who on earth are they when they are at home? The silver screen offers a frightening gallery of rogue vents – from Eric von Stroheim in The Great Gabbo to Michael Redgrave in Dead of Night and Anthony Hopkins in Magic – who have been led astray by their dummy-selves; and real vents can be just as mixed up as ...”

“... of Spain who controlled the finest army in the Old World and the seemingly inexhaustible gold and silver of the New’. It was the Dutch revolt which gave hope that the triumph of Spain could be averted and Spanish domination of Western Europe prevented. In August 1585, Elizabeth took the Dutch under her protection and promised to send forces to aid them. She ...”