“... first experience of West Side Story (in New York!), and the good food served on the post-war Queen Elizabeth (porridge, kedgeree and kippers for breakfast, a cup of bouillon at 11, tea, crumpets and cakes at four). The vignettes of the famous he has dealt with combine the fluttering adulation of the literary groupy with remembered episodes of quite stunning ...”

“... David Attenborough​ was born in 1926, the same year as Marilyn Monroe, Fidel Castro and Elizabeth II. He began hosting Zoo Quest on BBC television in 1954; not quite seventy years later, his latest series, Wild Isles, has just finished airing (it’s still available on iPlayer, or Amazon Prime for those outside the UK ...”

“... Beauvoir – at least for a few more months – and in addition to quoting Shakespeare, Shelley, Elizabeth Bishop and Joseph Brodsky to your friends, you might be memorising apothegms from Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, because even though you are enlightened and liberated, you are in pain over a man and jealous of his official girlfriend (you ...”

“... hosted by Theresa May. Banksy celebrated with an apology street party in occupied Bethlehem, where Elizabeth Regina, played by an actor, revealed a plaque cut into the Palestinian side of the separation wall with the words ‘Er … Sorry.’Polak’s niece is not the first person to name an animal after Balfour. The Palestinian artist Ibrahim Ghannam was six ...”

“... that acclaimed productions of The Tempest (by Macready in 1838) and Midsummer Night’s Dream (by Elizabeth Vestris in 1840) must have prepared the public for paintings that took scenes from these plays as their subject, and it cannot be a coincidence that Maclise’s Undine (one of the few key pictures missing from the exhibition) was painted in the same ...”

“... breasts, turning them brown. I had been dropping lit matches from Le Relais onto her belly and Elizabeth, delirious and probably overdosing on the Ecstasy, had been helping before I turned on her and chewed at one of her nipples until I couldn’t control myself and bit it off, swallowing ... In the morning, for some reason, Christie’s battered hands are ...”

“... How long will it last, how much will it cost? No one certain. Tuesday 22: Another copy of Elizabeth Smart’s Journal from Collins. Note from Geoffrey Bush about performance of Zodiac song-cycle at Salisbury on 13 February. Wrote to Ann Minkowski sending dedicated inserts from her copy of L’Autre back to her, and expressing sympathy with ...”

“... different from them. Eagleton’s reading of the so-called Anglo-Irish novel, from Edgeworth to Elizabeth Bowen, is based on this analysis, although the analysis itself comes in for a good deal of interrogation on the way. It is part of his understanding that material realities (e.g. land) are so differently understood in the British and the Irish ...”

“... garden, adorned with silver globes, goldfish in miniature grottoes and flowers in Grecian urns. As Elizabeth Jones writes in ‘Keats in the Suburbs’,* the genius of this style of gardening was the great horticulturalist John Claudius Loudoun (a road in St John’s Wood is named after him), who in 1838 published his Suburban Gardener and Villa ...”

“... of garlic, and John Minton’s seductive, and faintly Post-Impressionist, illustrations to Elizabeth David. Brooke, after the war, heads for the Mediterranean as fast as he possibly can, but, being Brooke, he is already deeply nostalgic for his Army days there and strives to reanimate certain epiphanic moments – with no success whatever. In his ...”

“... He pioneered the practice of giving his trucks female names: Twiggy, Joan Doreen, Excilie Elizabeth. They soon became something to be looked out for by bored motorway drivers on family schleps, or sales reps sick of Radio 4, who began to collect sightings of the ‘giants of the road’. Jools Holland publicised the craze, after his band passed the ...”

“... is a book published in 1940 called Our Princesses at Home, photographs commissioned by Queen Elizabeth of family life, with a saccharine and obviously royally approved commentary by the photographer, Lisa Sheridan. ‘We see here a royal duet at the piano. It is a pity that we cannot hear it also. The harmony which exists between the royal sisters is ...”

“... cannot stand in the middle of this;/the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.’ Or Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘At the Fishhouses’: ‘It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:/dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,/drawn from the cold hard mouth/of the world.’ In that poem, Bishop talks to a seal and sings ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... been proud of that as comic dialogue – yet we can hear an echo in it of John Bunyan’s wife Elizabeth pleading for his release before the justices in the repression which followed the Restoration: ‘because he is a Tinker, and a poor man, therefore he is despised, and cannot have justice.’ The mysterious human values of the poor, again and again ...”