“... and very glamorous: ‘I like her bird of paradise flight through the gay world. A long green feather in her hat suggests the image.’ But the biographical study which first earned her critical acclaim in England was The Last Attachment (1949), a bean-spilling account of Byron’s affair with Teresa Guiccioli, the Ravenna-born contessa described in ...”

“... Bayswater, she noticed a map of the Essex marshes, all ‘blue creeks’ and ‘wide expanses of green’. Over the new few months, the Dengie Peninsula in Essex, marshland bounded by the Blackwater Estuary to the north, the River Crouch to the south and an encircling sea wall to the east, became a favourite haunt. These expanses of ...”

“... of the novel Burr.’ The supporting cast in this séance included Marlon Brando, Greta Garbo, André Gide, the Beat poets, the Kennedys and the Sitwells. To follow a triumphant vanity production like Palimpsest with an authorised biography is a bit too-too. It’s as if Vidal were commissioning a monument to fit inside the scaffolding that he’s already ...”

“... love, of sweetly singing choirs (Erasmus loathed English Church music, anyway), or of healthy green lands in an ecologist’s dream. In his efforts to spread a scholarly Gospel, Erasmus met hostility and underwent much suffering. The Latin originals, more clearly than the translations, hint that he believed his sufferings were not unlike the trials of St ...”

“... admired, repeating phrases such as ‘Du rouge au vert tout le jaune se meurt’ (‘From red to green all the yellow dies’), in order to give the poem a spatial as well as a chromatic feel. His calligrams, or shape poems, took the process further still: one entitled ‘Il Pleut’, for instance, is in the form of five slanting streams of ...”

“... she thought he looked like Donald Duck, and insisted he put his clothes on and take her to meet André Breton. ‘There has only been one really good edition of anything that Shakespeare wrote,’ he told the writer Ruthven Todd, ‘and that is an edition of Venus and Adonis that I did myself.’ Stephen Spender, who met Jennings in Germany in 1945, noticed ...”

“... manatees and tapirs. But parrots were particularly popular. As the French Franciscan missionary André Thevet later wrote, the Tupinamba of present-day Rio de Janeiro held them ‘very dear’. Women fed them and called them ‘their friends’. European visitors were surprised to see that parrots were at liberty to come and go. They were plucked for their ...”

“... style … that would have frightened Schoenberg himself’. The French-American novelist Julien Green rhapsodised about the ‘monstrous beauty’ of Messiaen’s organ, ‘opening up immense caverns where rivers flow’. Aaron Copland recorded a different impression in his diary after hearing Messiaen at the Sainte-Trinité: ‘Everything from the ...”

“... atheist and the unapologetic Jew; the author of Literature and Revolution and co-signatory, with André Breton, of the Surrealist Manifesto; the companion of Frida Kahlo; the defender of embattled Einsteinians and Freudians; the founder of the Red Army and the pitiless opponent of Great Russian chauvinism. What do we have here but the ideal-type, of the ...”

“... 18th-century buildings. More lasting damage was inflicted by its most powerful postwar politician, André Morice, Radical senator and minister under the Fourth Republic, mayor of the city under the Fifth: a figure of unrelieved greed and opportunism, whose construction firm helped build the fortifications of the Atlantic Wall for the Nazis during the Second ...”

“... a valid criticism. Messiaen’s serenity can seem exasperating. ‘Death?’ he replied when André Malraux, as Minister of Cultural Affairs, asked him to consider composing a requiem for the dead of two world wars, ‘that exists, but I myself emphasise the Resurrection.’ And, talking to Claude Samuel about Japan: ‘Above all, it’s a country where ...”

“... had work in it, as did de Chirico, Magritte, Max Ernst and every other key figure in the movement. André Breton, dressed all in green, opened the show. Dylan Thomas circulated with a cup of string asking guests if they liked it weak or strong and Salvador Dalí nearly suffocated while giving a lecture in a diving ...”

“... my eyes from the sockets – a skirt barred with reds and yellows of the vilest kind, and a pea-green blouse on top, with a gaudy handkerchief on her head, supposed to be the very boldest taste. I shall retire into dove colour and old lavender, with a lace collar and lawn wristlets.’ Despite her ironic tone, Virginia Woolf had an aversion to fashion and ...”

“... not-art he thought he was making. His boxes were only the best known result of his working life. André Breton repeatedly said that the Surrealists were not trying to make art, they were trying to revolutionise life. Life, Breton claimed, was the pursuit of adventure ‘dans le langage, dans la rue, ou dans le rêve’. Though Cornell separated himself from ...”