“... but these are really survival memoirs. A Child Called ‘It’ by Dave Pelzer, Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt and Jung Chang’s Wild Swans initiated the genre in the 1990s. They were largely read for sentimental and/or sadomasochistic reasons, for their account of hardship overcome, regardless of their literary merit (Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work ...”

“... have never been published in book form. ‘I would write “Breakfast Poems” not Lunch Poems (Frank O’Hara),’ she writes on Sunday, 3 December. ‘Whatever breakfast consists of – gruel and grit on an upturned beer barrel, the sky already parched – it welcomes the day, looks out toward the horizon, harbours expectation.’ The next entry ...”

“... its incorporation of stray materials, the personal touch on the elbow that the American poet Frank Bidart, a close friend and associate of Lowell’s, ‘both amanuensis and sounding-board’ for the many books of sonnets, has brought to it. (A no doubt garbled account once reached me of Lowell flying Bidart across the Atlantic, so that he could fix ...”

“... symbolic figure, perhaps intended to displace a more commonly perceived symbolic figure – Anne Frank, let us say.’ That’s a pretty loaded insinuation. As late as 2005, Ozick, speaking at Harvard, was still condemning Styron’s decision to position a non-Jewish protagonist at the narrative centre, thereby diluting, obscuring and ultimately expunging ...”

“... line echoing ‘That’s Why Darkies Were Born’, the title of a song performed by the Caucasian Frank Munn in George White’s Scandals of 1931, a Broadway hit, and also recorded by the estimable Mildred Bailey that same year. Her friend Bing Crosby, a jazz-inflected singer then, who recorded a memorable ‘St Louis Blues’ with Duke Ellington’s band in ...”

“... ministry made up of the Marquis of Rockingham and his adherents – Edmund told his friend Charles O’Hara that ‘Will and I are down on their lists and I hope and believe will be attended to.’ They were. William was appointed under-secretary to Walpole’s friend Henry Seymour Conway, who became one of the King’s two Secretaries of State, and Edmund ...”

“... Andrew Davy. KILTURRA ELECTORAL DIVISION – John May and son; Pat Marren, Widow Corlely, John O’Hara, John Healy’s two daughters.What interests me here is the resonance of the names, all common in Ireland now. John Healy’s two daughters, or Mary Connell, found dead by a rick of turf: the names are enough to allow you to imagine them, to think you ...”