“... daughter, Harriet, Lowell began seeing a young poetry student who looked, according to Edmund Wilson, ‘like a Renoir’. On one occasion, the girl played hostess at their house in Boston, while Hardwick retreated upstairs to cry. Bishop cut short a visit in the summer of 1947 after Lowell began declaring that he was in love with her. When the couple ...”

“... opened in New York where Dudley alternated at the piano with Teddy (‘Fly Me to the Moon’) Wilson. But knowing nothing of its history or development and never having listened to it much, I was baffled and bored by jazz, while Jonathan Miller’s experience of it didn’t stretch much beyond undergraduate hops where it served as a background to his ...”

“... Out Chaplin, passed out, is hauled along the sidewalk by the scruff of his coat by staggering Ben Turpin. His toes trail; he is as supine as a sled. Turpin himself is so drunk he can hardly drag him. Chaplin comes quietly to, realises how well he is being served by his struggling pal, and with a royally delicate gesture plucks and savours a flower. By ...”

“... their youth and remembering some of the books they read then. There’s Camus and Sartre, Colin Wilson and Lawrence Durrell – not quite the literary equivalent of flares but inducing something of the same incredulity: ‘Did we really read/ wear these?’ I miss the atlas I really wanted and come away with one or two biographies, including a memoir of ...”

“... cold November evening, I sat with Linda in a shelter at the top of her garden looking out towards Ben Lomond. She told me about her daughter, who loved her friends, her golden retriever, the Scottish band Skipinnish and family holidays in Arisaig, where she scoured the beach for cowrie shells. Katie spent the summer after school volunteering in Malawi. ‘We ...”

“... Dorsey again (‘I may be the only singer who ever took vocal lessons from a trombone’), and Ben Webster (one of the first acts showcased on Sinatra’s own Reprise label). But a third influence is more notable, and an indication of just how deeply jazz was lodged in the young singer’s soul: the tenor saxophonist Lester Young. Young was Billie ...”

“... kind of civil liberty. One of Eisenhower’s first moves as president was to appoint Charles Erwin Wilson, the head of General Motors, as secretary of defense. He is the man who said: ‘What is good for General Motors is good for the country and what is good for the country is good for General Motors.’ ‘No administration,’ Stone commented, ‘ever ...”

“... figure and would have been more so had she not been kitted out in greasy raincoat, orange skirt, Ben Hogan golfing cap and carpet slippers. She would be going on sixty at this time. She must have prevailed on me to push the van as far as Albany Street, though I recall nothing of the exchange. What I do remember as I trundled the van across Gloucester Bridge ...”