“... separation from his wife. In August a letter Dickens had written to his friend and manager Arthur Smith, with permission to show it to anyone he chose, appeared in the New York Daily Tribune, making reference to the ‘mental disorder’ under which Catherine Dickens sometimes laboured. Not surprisingly, the legacies of 1858 included Wilkie Collins’s novel ...”

“... annotated Selections from the Prison Notebooks produced by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (1971), a great deal of Gramsci has become available in first-rate translation. There are two further volumes of Political Writings, covering the whole period from 1910 up to his imprisonment in 1926: and two editions of the Letters from Prison by Hamish ...”

“... When the modern reader makes the transition from merely dreaming along with Jane Grigson or Delia Smith to trying a recipe, the imperatives resume their familiar role. But this cannot have been the case with a book such as Household Management, or not for much of the time. How did the following sentence function? ‘Send [the pancakes] to table, and continue ...”

“... not 16. Anyone in any doubt should have compared the speech by the civilised and courageous Chris Smith with that of the bigot Tony Marlowe. ‘Predatory’ is a word much in evidence, the frail faltering flame of heterosexuality always in danger of being snuffed out by the hot homosexual wind. 1 March. It seems pretty well accepted now that much of one’s ...”

“... over. The selection was made by John Elderfield and his team – Ann Temkin, Joachim Pissarro and Anne Umland (the first two are newcomers to MoMA).* Elderfield has worked in P&S for years, under the directorships of both William Rubin (1973-88) and Kirk Varnedoe (1988-2000). Yet Elderfield’s final show in the old building, Modern Starts (2000), was cause ...”

“... into two suitors who each represented a side of the author’s bifurcated existence: Stephen Smith, a well-educated but relatively unsophisticated architect’s assistant, a new arrival in London from the country; and Henry Knight, an established, opinionated lawyer deeply at home in literary London (he also reviews books). Hardy’s fiction repeatedly ...”

“... fever pitch, whatever the papers say. During her haunting Alma happily went to see Dolores Smith ‘give clairvoyance’ one day, a variety show with the Crazy Gang and the Welsh conjuror Cardini at the London Palladium the next, a romantic comedy at the pictures after that. The so-called ‘morbid’ age was also, as Robert Graves and Alan Hodge ...”

“... who ought to have given her better advice, has drawn her into a most unhappy scrape.’ Commodore Smith of the Eltham ‘behaved like a father to her’, and on the slow voyage to Leith and then London she was carefully looked after, if not spoiled. In London, she found that she was famous. Jacobite leaders were being hanged, drawn and quartered before ...”

“... a play might be unique seemed to them very strange indeed. 27 June, Chichester. Talking to Maggie Smith about the number of grey heads in our audience, I compare them with a field of dandelion clocks. She says that she’s read or been told that the Warwickshire folk name for these was ‘chimney-sweeps’ so that Shakespeare’s ‘Golden lads and girls all ...”

“... about Bacon’s claim that his parents had ‘sold’ him to an older man, Cecil Harcourt-Smith, who took him to Berlin. But he did visit Berlin with Harcourt-Smith in the spring of 1927. He was excited by the city itself but not by German art: ‘It always had too much of a story to tell,’ he said. In Paris and ...”

“... unideological, patronage-based one-party government. He agrees that between the death of Queen Anne and the accession of George III, the Tories had no share in government, and were systematically discriminated against in the distribution of local patronage. But where his opponents think 1688 was decisive, he does not; where they think the propertied ...”

“... in the Independent of Picasso painting Guernica in 1937 in a collar and tie. 30 January. My friend Anne’s funeral and we are about to set off for the crematorium in the pouring rain when as we turn the car round a young pheasant skitters across the road. Nothing unusual in that except that this pheasant is pure white. I’m not given to a belief in signs or ...”

“... Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and an obscure adviser to Oliver Cromwell, Eleanor responded with Anne Hutchinson (the martyred rebel against American Puritanism, accused of believing in free love), Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson and the suffragette leader, Carrie Chapman Catt. Feminist supporter of minority rights, Eleanor Roosevelt is our ...”

“... than minor poets, he was, as often, lending his authority to a truism. Only once or twice, as with Anne Sexton, does Vendler haplessly show that a poet’s ‘whole’ reputation rests on next to nothing. Usually, as with Plath, she prints enough of what matters to configure a sensibility and vindicate her choice. Best of all, she gives us 16 pages of Charles ...”