“... was twenty years old). ‘Dear Mr Gable,’ Garland sings,I am writing this to youAnd I hope that you will read it so you knowMy heart beats like a hammerAnd I stutter and I stammerEvery time I see you at the picture show.I guess I’m just another fan of yoursAnd I thought I’d write and tell you so.She then starts to sing the familiar words:You ...”

“... words of Léon Blum looking back in 1935, not just ‘tolerable, but happy’. Emile Durkheim and Charles Péguy both saw it as a moment of ‘conscience humaine’ (the French conscience is both ‘consciousness’ and ‘conscience’) that introduced into political life a new level of moral seriousness. ‘Not since the Reformation,’ Reinach solemnly ...”

“... if everyone is trying to become the worst possible version of themselves. Here are Eugene Landy, Charles Manson, Phil Spector, Murry Wilson. Then there are the scarcely believable transformations of the boy-child Brian Wilson. How did he jump through the hula hoops of novelty pop to arrive, in the blink of an ‘I’, at a place where it seemed perfectly ...”

“... view, ‘a wonderful rhetoric of faith in the rebirth of the Sacred City of the Revolution’. Charles Nicholl repeats Delahaye’s story to the effect that Rimbaud enlisted in a Communard militia, but like most commentators, believes this is a ‘tenuous anecdote’ which doesn’t line up with the dates of Rimbaud’s visits to Paris in 1871. Rickword ...”

“... Last autumn, at the award ceremony of the 1994 Turner Prize, Charles Saatchi took the podium at the Tate Gallery. It was a very rare public appearance by Britain’s leading private collector of contemporary art. His words were awaited with interest. Since it opened to the public in 1985, the Saatchi collection in St John’s Wood has become a focus of what’s called the contemporary art debate ...”

“... coast from Brest to Emden might fall to Spain or her satellites. England’s naval power could not hope to crush all the possible invasion routes from such a long and menacing frontier, while on land Elizabeth lacked the ‘manpower to compete with the King of Spain who controlled the finest army in the Old World and the seemingly inexhaustible gold and silver ...”

“... to wipe my feet I trailed wet footsteps all across her white carpet, thus putting paid to any hope of research into the friars, barefoot or otherwise. I then went to see K. B. McFarlane. My special subject in Schools was Richard II so I had been to McFarlane’s lectures on the Lollard Knights; I also had a copy of some notes on his 1953 Ford Lectures ...”

“... was addressed was in little danger of becoming meaningless. ‘I’m very glad you like Alice,’ Charles Dodgson wrote to Margery Worthington in 1895, ‘but what wicked wicked sisters you have not to let you read it till they go to school! But perhaps the mistress had told them they had to learn a page of it by heart as a lesson?’ Dodgson is toasting the ...”

“... the keenest enthusiasts for ‘return’ weren’t Jews but evangelical Christians inspired by the hope that such a return would hasten the Second Coming. Ashley was among them, which didn’t make him a liberal friend of the Jews: he opposed Jewish emancipation in England, just as scores of millions of American evangelicals today who share his chiliastic ...”

“... is a ‘recent invention, a pseudo-scientific myth, and not even the most diligent journalist can hope to be objective.’ I understand the resistance some feel to a word which has been so much abused as ‘objectivity’. But dislike of a word does not justify abandoning the principle it denotes... The strength of many minority papers is precisely that their ...”

“... from her insistence on writing prose rather than poetry. Acker’s debt to Black Mountain – to Charles Olson, in particular, whose work she had known since she was still a schoolgirl – is quite clear and it is strange that this should have gone unrecognised, at least as she saw it, because she was not considered to be a poet. She adapted his concern with ...”

“... she met Thistlewood, selling food and animals in the informal trading networks that gave modest hope to Caribbean blacks. Thistlewood looked after her money, and even borrowed from her early in his career. In 1760 she gave birth to his son, and he set aside money in his will for Phibbah to buy her freedom. It’s hard to contest Walvin’s verdict that ...”

“... have been writing. Some examples: ‘She had a face like an upturned canoe,’ said by the actor Charles Gray at breakfast in Dundee (though of whom I can’t remember). A. I’ve been salmon fishing. B. It’s not the season. A. No. I thought I’d take the blighters by surprise. ‘Here we are. Fat Pig One and Fat Pig Two.’ Said by my mother when ...”

“... appearance several months ago, is, I think, such a work.’ Williams’s boss’s widow later told Charles Shields, who tells the story in The Man who Wrote the Perfect Novel, that the novelist stationed himself in the English department’s outer office, in sight of the faculty mailboxes, the morning after Howe’s review reached subscribers in Colorado. A ...”

“... who were more interested in eating than talking and who thus presented less of a social peril. Charles Boyer, for example, who was appearing next door to us on 45th Street in Rattigan’s Man and Boy. With Leslie Howard he had been a particular heart-throb of Mam’s. Now, napkin tucked under his chin and in that all too imitable accent in which he’d ...”