“... a monk and a rosary each. The list of stars in the film (Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Edward Norton, all the others mentioned elsewhere in this piece) is a clue to what we are watching. They are all themselves, bringing with them the clouds of movies they have been in. They have come to the party. This effect is largely kept up by the ...”

“... Simone Signoret. ‘There were other beautiful girls who could paint at the time,’ the architect Edward Jones recalled, ‘but none who were quite as wonderful as her.’ She had an acting career on the side, including a bit part in Alfie. She was almost cast as the lead in Darling, before Julie Christie came along. She danced on Ready Steady Go!, modelled ...”

“... Marx family grave. Eleanor’s ending was sad. She became infatuated with a Socialist rogue called Edward Aveling. He set up house with Eleanor and became her husband in all but name. This continued for some years. In June 1897 Aveling married Eva Frye, an actress of 22. He continued to live with Eleanor until August, when he spent a few days with his wife. In ...”

“... I do not think that, till the end of his days, he regarded me as a serious writer.’ Conrad, whom Edward Garnett brought to Ford’s cottage at Bonnington in September 1898, was not much of an improvement. Every inch the ship’s captain, he thrust his hands firmly into the pockets of his reefer-coat and pointed his ‘black torpedo beard’ in a vaguely ...”

“... mainly by inference. For example, the first poem the adolescent Eliot fell in love with was Edward Fitzgerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Fitzgerald was exclusively attracted to men – though like Eliot embarked on an unhappy marriage – and the Rubáiyát itself was addressed in Persian to a young boy, which Eliot, with his interest in ...”

“... to conjecture of this sort. In 1944, during a conversation very much designed to go on record, she said: ‘I think that actual life supplies a writer with characters much less than is thought ... People in life hardly seem to be definite enough to appear in print. They are not good or bad enough, or clever or stupid enough, or comic or pitiful enough.’ When ...”

“... I thought very little about him until around ten years ago, when my friend James Fenton, the poet, said that on a trip to South Korea he had been approached by a Korean professor who asked him if it was true that ‘ck’ in the name ‘Cockburn’ was not pronounced. When James asked him why he was interested the professor explained that he was writing a book ...”

“... Theory and Practice. I won’t go into all that again, although there is plenty more that could be said. By someone else. My own role at the conference had little to do with debates about critical theory. I was there as a kind of relic from the past, as someone who used to edit ‘little magazines’. My function, it seemed, was to represent a marginalised ...”

“... highbrow with intellectual leanings’ but ‘a simple, rather stupid man’. This may have been said only to outbid Elspeth Huxley in a modesty contest, but he could sometimes be genuinely overawed by the company. Arriving at a very grand luncheon party, he saw ‘ten sophisticated guests assembled’ and would have bolted had his wife not been there to ...”

“... slim. John Gielgud was once telling me about Mrs Simpson and how smart she was. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘she’d have made a disastrous queen. Didn’t go to the theatre at all.’ 19 January. Alan Bates opens tonight at the Barbican in the RSC production of Antony and Cleopatra. The version put on at Stratford opened with Antony making love to ...”

“... be disappointed on opening the book, which succeeds in spite of itself and the line it takes. Edward Garnett told Lawrence that The White Peacock had every fault known to the English novel but that its author had genius. Elizabeth Smart was not a genius: but she is the rare case of a writer who succeeds by writing as if she were one. She succeeded in her ...”

“... being fine wool she did expect to have again eight yards of fine cloth, the list of the said run web being all white, but … Thompson did bring [her] a much coarser woollen web with a black list, [she] being very certain that it was not her web.’ Once woven, the cloth had to be ‘litted’ or dyed – the spinster Jane Browne was hired to dye ...”

“... right-wing politician Moshe Feiglin took to Israeli television to invoke Hitler:As Hitler … once said, ‘I cannot live in this world if there is one Jew left in it.’ We will not be able to live in this land if one Islamo-Nazi is left in Gaza, and if we do not go back to Gaza and turn it into Hebrew Gaza.As Jake Romm wrote in Parapraxis, a magazine founded ...”

“... is less a reflection of how real people speak than how they should. (This is sometimes said as a criticism of Moore, but it shouldn’t be. For readers who prefer their narrators to be drearily realistic mediocrities, there are plenty of novels to choose from.) What Tassie most has in common with her creator is a hyper-awareness of the way words ...”