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“... it cannot use it in practice.’ In his late teens Cole began a correspondence course with Wolsey Hall in Oxford, and another, not long after, with the New York Institute of Photography. He also gained work at Zonk!, a mass-circulation magazine founded in 1949 and aimed at a Black South African readership with money to spend. Not much is known about how Cole ...”

“... other, known but unseen narrative. The satire bounces back and forth between the two in a comic hall of mirrors and that is where Austen leaves the woman who wants to be ‘fine’ but whose finery can get her nowhere, with nothing but her own reflection. The conundrum of who women dress for, the unspoken question of why we mind about our clothes, as Austen ...”

“... of his father in A House for Mr Biswas, in which Biswas daydreams while reading the novels of Hall Caine and Marie Corelli, and tries to use the word ‘bower’ because he found it in Wordsworth (by way of the Royal Reader). The sadness clouding that novel is that one is always oneself even when one does not know it; freedom is always qualified, a shout ...”

“... his various rented attics, and by keeping his successive (and sometimes simultaneous) lovers – Ruth Bowman, Monica Jones, Patsy Strang, Maeve Brennan, Betty Mackereth – at arm’s length, he managed to preserve not only the sense of freedom that was necessary for his poems, but the connection to Eva that nourished them. Booth even goes so far as to ...”

“... John Seely, Lord Mottistone. In spirit, if not detail, it is heir to Colen Campbell’s Ebberston Hall near Scarborough: sprightly and miles away from Office of Works Georgian, RAF Neo-Georgian, War Office Georgian.Perhaps the Architecture of the Modern Age had already arrived. It was there for all to see in the Germany of the Weimar republic: glass and ...”

“... Write, Speak contains little except interviews; when an answer sounds like an echo in a marble hall, it is because he has repurposed it from Speak, Memory. The sameness is unrelieved – until the late 1960s, when various malpractising journalists begin asking him about hippies, which is pleasant. (‘I feel nothing but contemptuous pity for the illiterate ...”

“... letter to Norton: ‘The country is gloomy, anxious, and London reflects its gloom. Westminster Hall and the Tower were half blown up two days ago by Irish Dynamiters.’Eighteen months earlier, a young Irishman recently returned from America, Thomas J. Clarke, one of O’Donovan Rossa’s Sancho Panzas, had been arrested in London. Using evidence of an ...”

“... the austere concrete box of a decommissioned power station. The ancient oak trees at Mundon Hall were already beginning to die when Warner first saw them; the trunks still stand in spindly echelon. It was during a visit to the Essex marshland that she became, as her biographer Claire Harman puts it, ‘properly her own person’. For the first time in ...”

“... suspect that my images of it were imprinted on my mind within minutes of moving in.The entrance hall, which was big enough to contain a large fireplace, had probably been designed to be used as a breakfast-room. The first thing seen on coming in was a statue two-thirds life-size, a wood carving of a helmeted guardsman with a shield and spear standing on a ...”

“... male novelists who like to talk about landing or shooting or climbing The Big One: Mailer as Babe Ruth wanting to ‘hit the longest ball ever to go up into the accelerated hurricane air of our American letters’ or Hemingway, who ‘wouldn’t fight Dr Tolstoi in a 20-round bout because I know he would knock my cars off’. Obviously, what Hawthorne had ...”