“... quoits, a mouth harp, a bone pointer or stylus, amber beads and a milk tooth belonging to a child between the ages of nine and twelve, undecayed but worn from grinding. Some finds, such as coins and pottery, could be dated with a degree of precision. But others, apparently originating on one side of the Reformation or the other, resisted ...”

“... of wide learning who amassed one of the finest private libraries in the country. Born the fifth child of seven, the young Michael grew up among a veritable forest of Foots, all passionately committed to the Liberal verities in a household where a radical Whig sense of history, literature and rhetoric was not just part of the furniture but pretty much what ...”

“... The best-known object of her affections seems to have been the novelist and aesthetician Vernon Lee, to whom she obliquely declared herself in two love poems included in a letter of 1886. ‘You are something of an electric battery to me … & I am getting faint fr. want of contact!’ she wrote a few months later; but ...”

“... a life of Burne-Jones, appeared two years earlier, in 1975, when she was nearly 60. Until then child-rearing, teaching, a difficult marriage and the constant struggle to keep the family afloat – which failed several times, once literally when their houseboat sank in the Thames – had left little time for writing. Other biographies followed but it was ...”

“... saw its expediency: ‘Men do not love those who remind them of their sins … and the mulatto child’s face is a standing accusation against him who is master and father to the child.’ Even when proposed in good faith, by Lincoln among others, colonisation was, in Douglass’s mind, a diabolical idea, a cowardly ...”

“... through Milton and Blake and Keats, to David Jones, Gascoyne, Dylan Thomas, Nicholas Moore, to Lee Harwood’s Cable Street, Bill Griffiths’s Whitechapel and Brian Catling’s The Stumbling Block. London infected its interpreters, soliciting contributions to an open-ended project. The names of the poets were the stanzas of a continuous book. Aidan ...”

“... get serious, and there’s less levity, much less humour. In ‘The Runner’ the abduction of a child from a park is observed by a jogger and a woman who lives in his apartment building. She is quick to make assumptions about the incident: The father gets out and takes the little boy … It’s all around us, isn’t it? They have babies before they’re ...”

“... situation’. On the same day, Marilyn Butler was equally effusive on Radio 3 and Hermione Lee assured us in the Observer that the author has ‘impeccably heroic socialist and feminist credentials’. My daughter-in-law brought home Cosmopolitan with a long extract, prettily illustrated, and an astounding comment from Emma Dally: ‘Although it is not ...”

“... His skill arouses Margarita, who has ‘a passion for all people who do anything to perfection’. Lee Goff’s peculiar skill evokes the same delight and horror as that of the perfect assassin, though he is dealing with the effects of other people’s murders, and not doing any killing himself (except of pigs and rabbits). It is a fine thing, rare in fiction ...”

“... mother says. ‘And that is why you are a writer.’ Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart was born an only child in Leningrad on 5 July 1972. His parents met at music school. Nina was headstrong and from a good family; she played the piano, and later gave lessons. Semyon, a tough but witty son of a soldier killed in the Second World War, had ambitions of becoming an ...”

“... was the only writer on Monroe to spot these moments of what might seem like odd affinity. Lee Strasberg’s daughter, Susan, remembered a self-portrait Monroe drew alongside a sketch of a Negro girl in ‘a sad-looking dress, one sock falling down around her ankles’. And according to Gloria Steinem, when the Mocambo nightclub in Los Angeles was ...”

“... was to all intents and purposes a native American – an ‘imaginary portrait’, as Sidney Lee wrote in 1898, of the ‘aboriginal savage of the New World’? This is the principal theme of the Vaughans’ learned and sceptical cultural history of Shakespeare’s Caliban, a book which traces both the construction of the various American readings of The ...”

“... turned-out postman picking his way through the rubble lining Frankfurt’s city hall. In Munich, Lee Miller was photographed soaping herself in Hitler’s bath. Walter Sanders caught the wife and daughter of an American soldier drinking tea in a luxurious dining car, looking out at the train next to them, in which DPs were squashed into boxcars. Sollors has ...”

“... unexpectedly through the yard. The house, and much of the rest of the Palisades section of Fort Lee, was built around 1925, at a time when the Garden City Movement was underway in Britain, and, independently, Frederick Law Olmsted and Clarence Stein’s Garden Suburb Movement was taking hold in America. This neighbourhood, across the Hudson from uptown ...”

“... life: a dandy’s masquerade of perfect equipoise.Porter (1891-1964) was the cosseted surviving child of three born to Kate and Sam Porter, a pharmacist in Peru, Indiana. He inherited his aptitude for music from his father, a good pianist with an attractive tenor voice. ‘I suppose he started me writing lyrics,’ Porter said – he wrote his first song ...”