“... promptings of her heart among rosy-cheeked girls with aprons crackling against bare skin, like an Angela Brazil tale gone mad. Miss Peabody starts getting drunk and embarrassing other London office-workers. When her mother dies she goes to Australia to meet Diana Hopewell, whom she believes to be an Amazonian, horse-riding sort of woman. But the readers (Miss ...”

“... a radical bookshop and publisher in North London, Johnson met the Trinidadian poet and activist John La Rose, who became his mentor. He was also introduced to Caribbean intellectuals including Brathwaite, Andrew Salkey and Sam Selvon.With Selvon’s encouragement, Johnson abandoned his attempts to write poetry in standard English and began experimenting ...”

“... Peter Christopherson, whom I knew, though not especially well. When I interviewed Rushton (a.k.a. John Balance) in 2000, one of the things that came up was his deep, abiding love for Kate Bush. Actually, it was more like he saw her as some form of household deity or guardian spirit: ‘She’s so hidden … she’s definitely one of the aspects of the ...”

“... it is?’ ‘No,’ said the man, and he shook out his newspaper, leaving my father to walk away. John McGahern went to London in 1954 to work for a few months on the building sites: ‘When I walked off the boat at Holyhead to the waiting London train – and thought of Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, all the great English writers I had read and studied – I ...”

“... she was the embodiment of the revolutionary democracy we had not yet learned how to imagine,’ Angela Davis observed. ‘My people need inspiration,’ Simone said. In the spectacle she made of herself as well as in her voice – ‘I want people to know who I am,’ she said – Simone became a race champion. In the mid-1960s Vernon Jordan, the head of ...”

“... verse (from Anon on the structure of the cosmos – ‘as appel the eorthe is round’ – to John Updike on cosmic gall), is therefore fighting a lost battle. The editors make out a brave case for the similarity of poet and scientist (‘the starting-point for both of their activities is the imagination’), dispute old distinctions between ...”

“... repetitions and sequencing. This approach comes close to that of a quick-eared anthologist, like Angela Carter in her Book of Fairy Tales, where she manages to give fresh meanings to stale misogynist topoi simply by framing and grouping the tales under subheadings such as ‘Good Girls and Where It Gets Them’ and ‘Strong Minds and Low Cunning’. Angels ...”

“... forests and mountains, birds, flowers and animals, all the way from James Herriot’s Yorkshire to Angela Rippon’s West Country. The world we never knew becomes the world we have lost and thus the world we want to find again: the only paradise we really seek to regain is the one which was never ours to lose. Not since the 1890s or the 1930s has the worship ...”

“... insouciance that might well lift the spirits of her less stalwart readers. Much influenced by Angela Carter (Sexing the cherry bears a close relation to Nights at the Circus), Winterson gives us a woman who breaks the rules on a monstrous scale. The Dog-Woman is as earthy as her son is dreamy. But she, too, is looking for magic, and believes in ...”

“... three most prominent Oxford professors of English since the war have all been populist pretenders. John Carey, scourge of Modernist ‘intellectuals’ and reliable dribbler of cold water on all forms of overheated aestheticism, comes across as the last defender of sensible English decency. Terry Eagleton, with his blokeish binarisms and comic’s ...”

“... In the summer of 1831, James Woods, master of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Wordsworth’s former tutor, decided that his college should have a portrait of its most celebrated living alumnus. He commissioned Henry William Pickersgill – an apprentice Spitalfields silk-weaver turned Royal Academician – to produce a full-length oil painting of Wordsworth in an appropriately sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal Mount ...”

“... Grit and Glamour of an Icon’. She has interviewed more than 250 people, starting with the late John Warner (Taylor’s penultimate husband, a Republican senator) and her book reads like an extended feature for Vanity Fair. We learn that Bob Dylan adored her in Raintree County and that David Lynch kissed her after the 1987 Oscars (she was a fan of Blue ...”

“... trilingual, exchanging email addresses with Mario Vargas Llosa and fielding calls from Angela Merkel. In reality, Glavinic and Kehlmann are better matched. They are very similar writers, a literary double act: for a recent article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung about the Viennese literary scene, they turned up together to be ...”

“... industry’ – through Isherwood.) Those stars include Fred Astaire, Katharine Hepburn, Angela Lansbury, the much too pretty Teri Garr, the much too beautiful Warren Beatty, Julianne Moore (who also stars in the film A Single Man), Montgomery Clift (with rather more eyebrow than eyelashes), the late, great Joan Rivers (drawn in ink while talking to ...”

“... with poets, translators, excitable theorists, its egalitarianism. Robin Blackburn on slavery, Angela Livingstone on Tsvetaeva, Ernesto Laclau’s charismatic mystifications. Dawn Ades’s work on Latin America inspired artists from all over the continent to donate paintings and sculpture, so it has a collection unrivalled by any other UK ...”