“... pleased her most is s-e-x as observed and enjoyed from the feminine vantage point.’ Hutchins, Maxwell Geismar said, was a writer who went about ‘describing casually all the “taboo” subjects that are perhaps better repressed’. ‘A career of this kind,’ Stanley Kauffmann wrote in 1964, that takes sexual and other sensory pleasures so ...”

“... building in Port Glasgow is a castle – Newark Castle, inherited in the 17th century by the Maxwell family, who turned it from an austere tower house into what the guidebook calls a Renaissance mansion. The Clyde rises and falls only a few yards from the castle’s back door, and in 1668 Sir George Maxwell sold ...”

“... 1943, over the West River (as James Schuyler thought it should be called) to New Jersey (and the Maxwell House factory): ‘Chemical air/sweeps in from New Jersey,/and smells of coffee.’ One would almost not know of its provenance or personal significance, the evidence is pushed back onto two or three words, ‘the chains of condemned ...”

“... altogether sinister ‘period’ sprite, the celebrity-chasing and deeply closeted impresaria Elsa Maxwell.) All three of Cohen’s subjects were intelligent, ambitious, creative, forceful women blessed with charisma, charm and near inexhaustible energy, not to mention the financial wherewithal to create around themselves what their biographer calls, tactfully ...”

“... of Aughrim, about John Leo’s debts, and his run-ins with the owner of the local newspaper, William Hastings. All this and more can be discerned from census returns, court records and newspaper archives. And I imagined things that I couldn’t actually prove. I wondered if, when he was in Dublin (to get married, for example, or to help transport the ...”