“... Augustine was black. The longest and most revealing correspondence is with Niall Montgomery, a close friend from university and later a collaborator on his newspaper column, with whom O’Nolan liked to share in-jokes, but on whom he could turn like a terrier, as in this 1964 letter accusing him of plagiarism: ‘You are known to far more than me as the ...”

“... and prone to self-destruction. Wieners himself remembered taking the ferry to Provincetown with Frank O’Hara: ‘We stood again below deck by the hectic Atlantic cutting at our feet, speaking of Hart Crane and the last words we would have in our mouths at that moment of surrender.’ His idol was Billie Holiday, who gives the name to one of his best short ...”

“... conversation, from court gossip, reports of his hunting prowess and the tunes of seguidillas, to frank discussions of masturbation and some remarkable doodles, including a self-portrait of Goya smoking a cigarette. The two men exchanged drawings of their penises (‘Jesus! What a testimony!’ Goya marvelled on receiving Zapater’s letter). During an ...”

“... Radcliffe and the housing-estate boy, Victor Tolson, become obsessed with each other. They become close while working for a tent contractor, Ewbank, who later turns up in The Contractor. The play tells the story of a gang of marquee builders working at a wedding. The Royal Court summoned the tent company Storey himself had worked for in Wakefield to show the ...”

“... Ten’ recent cultural attractions. There’s special praise for the 2014 City Lights reissue of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, a ‘time machine’ to a different New York, in which ‘insouciance’ was ‘the name of the game’ (sounds like the kind of conversation she wouldn’t have minded joining). More revealing still, however, is the reaffirmation ...”

“... few trips to New York, including momentous visits to the Museum of Modern Art, where he catches a Frank Stella retrospective, and the Guggenheim Museum, where he sees a Moholy-Nagy exhibition. On his return to France, Bois gives up his own artmaking, and after a tedious course in Pau he decides against art history too. The siren call now comes from critical ...”

“... lecture called ‘Writing American Fiction’ at a small community college in Monmouth, Oregon. A close buddy from my graduate school days at the University of Chicago was teaching there and had arranged the invitation. I accepted not only because of the opportunity the trip afforded me to see, for the first time in five years, my friends Bob and Ida Baker ...”

“... national hero. He says that this is ‘completely untrue’. Kay Summersby had, however, been very close to Eisenhower and their romance had been an open secret at Allied headquarters (though there is no evidence that she was his mistress and her own account, written after his death when she was dying of cancer, is that she was not). Mamie does not come ...”

“... of his four years at the Treasury. Only Terry Coleman, in his extended Guardian interviews, gets close to his subjects. The responsible profile-writer has to exercise discretion. On the other hand, to take an obvious example, the personal insecurity of a senior politician, which may have wide public consequences, can only be appraised by reference to his ...”

“... been dubbed “barcode façades”’; and finally the ‘iconic’ works of the starchitects – Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind et al – who, Hatherley sneers, ‘manage to combine formal spectacle and moralistic sobriety’. Such is the bagginess of pseudomodernism that there’s room not only for former ...”

“... in politics. Not that the Young Conservatives were aimless sybarites. To the Tory journalist Frank Johnson they were just as zealous in their own way as Maoists – ‘a ruthless organisation dedicated to one fanatical aim: marriage’. Tim Bale’s latest book, The Conservatives since 1945, examines the motors of change within the party at every level ...”

“... in which Pacifica carries Mrs Copperfield into the sea. At times the narrative voice comes close to free indirect style, but more often the characters observe and discuss themselves and one another with a detachment caricaturing that of a third-person narrator: one of her threatening men reminds Christina ‘of certain comedians who are at last given a ...”

“... but of the anti-racist consensus too. What got her into trouble was ‘Getting In and Out’, a frank investigation, included in this collection, into the proprietorship of black pain. Like almost all of Smith’s essays, the piece is interested in several things at once: it is partly a straightforward and mostly laudatory review of Jordan Peele’s ...”

“... old hens, they just say “Quar!”’ The savagery of these battles was unavoidable given the close nature of the conflict and the relentlessness of the enemy attacks. The defeat of the Egyptian nationalists at Tel-el-Kebir in 1882 was a harbinger of the future: once the ramparts were overwhelmed, there was a lot of ‘bayonet work’ and ‘very little ...”

“... However, unless evidence to the contrary has been edited away, Regina and Flannery had a close, genuinely affectionate and thoroughly unsentimental relationship from start to finish. This matters, because for the last 13 years of her life Flannery O’Connor lived with her mother, having been forced by illness to return from the North, where she had ...”