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“... traces the change from her initial Victorian view of art as masculine – she keenly admired Stevenson and Kipling – and her scorn of ‘lady writers’ who she believed ‘lacked discipline, shaping intelligence and craft’, to her later recognition that female artistry was feasible. She saw the possibility first in great singers and actresses ...”

“... on plates at the door? The señor and señora are preparing them to starve.’ The title story in David Leavitt’s Family Dancing begins with a graduation party, flower arrangement and girls in starched tunics, handing trays around. But like the other stories, ‘Family Dancing’ soon scratches its polished surfaces and considers the rough edges of Middle ...”

“... Apsley (1616-83). The poem described by Lee as ‘rarely accessible’, now easily accessible in David Norbrook’s modern spelling edition, offers according to Norbrook ‘a particularly strong corrective to the conventional view that literature after 1660 became firmly Royalist’, for it is entirely informed by the religious and political ideals of ...”

“... say it. The fellows at Grandpop’s table didn’t trust the new Democratic standard-bearer, Adlai Stevenson. They thought he might be a little soft. They were willing to give Eisenhower the benefit of the doubt; he was a hero of the war, after all. My dad, who didn’t join in the talk much, trusted Ike because he had been able to win a war while negotiating ...”

“... it. Graham was close to Lyndon Johnson, was captivated by Kennedy and was friendly with Adlai Stevenson. At the Democratic Party’s 1960 Convention in Los Angeles he was friends with all the key players and, uniquely, had all their private telephone numbers. By the opening day, Monday, it was clear that the tide was running strongly for Kennedy. Calling ...”

“... Jewish, too. This discovery brightens Tom up. He now knows he is Jewish. He will wear the Star of David, like that on his Uncle John’s war grave, he will learn Hebrew and support the state of Israel. Tom has, at last, got a general idea, a myth, into his pragmatic head – a tribal and political idea to warm up his bleak sense of duty. Tom is more ...”

“... of many a lesser figure. In what might be called the peripheral stakes Dylan Thomas and even David Jones have had more attention in some quarters – in the case of Dylan Thomas, with a wild publicity which has had little enough to do with his work. MacDiarmid, it is true, has had a share of irrelevant – and sometimes damaging – publicity, mainly ...”

“... used to be known as ‘brinkmanship’. Glover records the Strangelovean comment of Adlai Stevenson as US ambassador to the UN that ‘a nuclear war is bound to be divisive’ and judges that the ‘imagination’ (a term apparently used without irony) of the Pentagon top brass ‘had been charged by the traumatic briefing on the full effects of ...”

“... omitted much that is interesting and revealing, but the omission of Bishop’s letters to Anne Stevenson, who wrote the first book about her work, seems odd. These letters, packed with insight and wonderful phrases, are quoted in Brett Millier’s biography, in David Kalstone’s Becoming a Poet and in Lorrie ...”

“... was done with a nurse’s blue pencil on the flyleaf of a volume of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson.‘These drawings were presented to me by a very ill man,’ the catalogue entry read, quoting Edward Adamson, the art therapist who first encountered J.J. Beegan in 1946. By the time they met, Adamson explained, Beegan ‘had been in a locked ward in ...”

“... use of the exotic props of the desert island location, and accepts the inheritance of Defoe and Stevenson. Queen of Stones keeps closer to home, making the psychological as well as the socio-economic backgrounds of the children impinge upon the exceptional series of actions which takes place on the Dorset coast. It would be possible to proceed from here to ...”

“... there are many more.’ It’s these other tones which are missing in The Ice-Pilot Speaks. Anne Stevenson compares Stainer to Emily Dickinson, but she reminds me more of Edith Sitwell, particularly the Sitwell of Façade, not in terms of rhythm (which Sitwell used quite skilfully and Stainer hardly uses at all) but in terms of emotional range and ...”

“... himself ‘entitled to seek out and obtain what he craved, instantly’. Kennedy said that David Cecil’s biography of Lord Melbourne, which depicted young aristocrats having a good time while performing heroic feats in the service of Queen and country, was one of his favourite books. When Kennedy was about to run for the Senate, according to ...”

“... the supreme politician of the age. He was wrong. The party chose its liberal darling Adlai Stevenson for a second time, even though he stood little chance of defeating Eisenhower. Johnson received barely 5 per cent of the ballot. What surprised his supporters was not so much that he failed – it was hard to see how he could have succeeded, given his ...”

“... thanks to propaganda campaigns spearheaded by Bullingdon Club toffs like Boris Johnson and David Cameron, underwent significant revision. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the horse path alongside the Regent’s Canal was mud, and forbidden to pedestrians and cyclists alike, I rode to my gardening job in Limehouse on a market wreck bought for ...”