“... Those who have tried to make sense of Frank Lloyd Wright’s own account of his life will be grateful to Brendan Gill. He relieves us of doubts about our intelligence. As you read the Autobiography much does not quite fit. The feeling grows on you, as it must on the victims of confidence tricksters, that you cannot follow the story because you are stupid ...”

“... took the picture, Lisette Model, is best known as a street photographer. She counted Diane Arbus, Peter Hujar and Larry Fink among her followers. But the publication of Lisette Model: The Jazz Pictures – a book of little-known photographs – is likely to prompt a reappraisal of Model’s legacy (Eakins, £56).Model was born Elise Stern in 1901 in ...”

“... husband; George Weidenfeld, her second; and her last recorded lover, the French writer Bernard Frank. There is no photograph of her third husband, the millionaire Derek Jackson, but he did not seriously engross her. She bit him twice, really hard the second time, so he shuffled off into his sixth marriage, leaving her with a farmhouse near St Tropez and ...”

“... when the crowd turned against him.  Later, to a packed meeting of the parliamentary party. Frank Dobson was first up. ‘Be warned,’ he said, ‘the Lib Dems and the Tories have not abandoned party politics.’ There was, he alleged, a three-part strategy. When they had disposed of the Speaker, they would demand Gordon’s resignation. If they got ...”

“... speaking his mind, getting it wrong sometimes, looking on the bright side, and staying involved. Peter Matthiessen, the accomplished author of numerous books of travel and of wry and terrible tales of violence on remote frontiers, perhaps also considers himself a friend of Africa. He loves to be there and incessantly returns: there are many things in Africa ...”

“... among diatribes of this sort it comes at the weary end of a line that stretches through books by Peter Blake, Brent Brolin, Robert Venturi and others right back to Jane Jacobs’s epoch-breaking attack on Le Corbusier in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, over twenty years ago. Of course, all this has guaranteed Wolfe a readership whose anti-modern ...”

“... a slasher – though there is a very severe notice of the autobiographies of Anthony Powell and Peter Quennell – and he seems to enjoy being generous to other reviewers, as when he justly praises John Updike. He is full of gratitude to literary editors, commemorating Ian Hamilton’s work on the New Review in terms only this side of idolatry. Such writers ...”

“... novel Scar Tissue along with developments in evolutionary theory that affect old age. Peter Medawar argued that the effect of natural selection grows weaker with time, and that old age is ‘in effect a biological dumping ground’ – a ‘genetic dustbin’. But this will no longer do; interest has now settled on the phenomenon of the senescent ...”

“... the prose of star reporters like Hemingway. In his autobiography Slightly out of Focus, Capa was frank about his romancing. Highlighting reality with touches of fiction is a universal game: Capa enjoyed catching others playing it, and was reckoned to have cost Taft an election with photographs showing publicity pictures being taken of the Senator hooked up ...”

“... is always erudite, particularly on non-European cuisines, and often deeply serious, as in his frank and affectionate profiles of Elizabeth David, Claudia Roden, Alan Davidson and Christopher Driver. Above all, he has an endearingly amateur – in both senses – quality. Symptomatic of this is a detail volunteered by Ann Barr in her introduction. She ...”

“... fan magazine, heavily illustrated and printed in colour, was widely read in occupied France. Anne Frank slept in a bedroom adorned with photographs of the Third Reich movie star Heinz Rühmann (alongside Ray Milland and Deanna Durbin), and devoured the weekly Dutch film magazine, devoted largely to German releases, that the family’s helpers brought her. One ...”

“... is unmasked he should turn out to be ... other critics. The first to be identified is our own Frank Kermode, whose argument in his 1973 Eliot lectures, The Classic, is in two sentences of the second lecture neatly travestied and so dismissed. He survives to fight another day, as we shall see. The next antagonist, in a third lecture called ‘Shakespeare ...”

“... Anderson explored the idea of a character challenging the notion of reality as others conceive it: Frank Machin in This Sporting Life (1963) tries (and ultimately fails) to wrest control of his destiny from the forces of the establishment. At one point, in the dressing-room after a rugby match, Machin has a hosepipe turned on him as a joke. His immediate ...”

“... Finally he made his speech, as he had to; it was pained and cold, but polite. A little later Peter Hall, called upon to speak for the other guests, took a different line, telling them warmly that they were as disgusting a group as it had ever been his misfortune to encounter. It was an admirable and memorable speech. Whether or not it was more admirable ...”

“... she admired Britten, who set some of her poems, and in the days of their widowhood grew close to Peter Pears. She knew Vaughan Williams (detecting a physical resemblance to T.F. Powys, also to Arthur Machen) and records a significant conversation she had with him while his wife and Gerald Finzi’s were buying things in Valentine Ackland’s antique shop. He ...”