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“... child. His parents ‘wanted the boy to be a genius’. They praised and circulated everything he drew or wrote. But schools were a problem and he kept dropping out. In his teens in Cadaques he fell in with a sinister bunch of beach boys. By the age of 17, his father said, he was ‘far gone in drugs and sodomy’. Still, in 1971 a New York psychiatrist told ...”

“... 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 tells us, with a pregnant use of the ...”

“... all, we would be cavorting now. It would be one of those times when I luxuriate completely and drew out everything – it is strange to absolutely know this, to feel this absolutely, and to do nothing but watch somehow as it goes by so very closely … All the windows are open and all the shutters are folded back and I can hear the rain and I can hear the ...”

“... as well as her commercial acumen. To establish the new publishing house for writing by women, she drew together a band of collaborators: Harriet Spicer, Ruthie Petrie, Ursula Owen and, later, Alexandra Pringle and Lennie Goodings. Carmen exhumed and gave a new lease of life to writers such as Rebecca West, Rosamond Lehmann, ...”

“... George Duckworth, the Stephen sisters’ half-brothers by their mother’s first marriage. Poole drew on these memoirs, on a letter in which Woolf recalled George Duckworth ‘fondling’ her over her Greek lessons, and on the abundant evidence of her intense and life-long ambivalence toward the study of Greek (an uneasy mixture of reverence for the ideal ...”

“... in Sylva for its being a guide for stewards and landowners. (You don’t need a spatula to enjoy Elizabeth David.) There was an ash tree outside our house in Kentish Town: I know because I had to ask the council to lop away some of the upper growth as it came closer to the bedroom window. (The ancient tree in James’s story is uncomfortably close to the ...”

“... And in the half-century since his death, the royal roll-call has been further extended. Queen Elizabeth II is his great-great-niece, King Carl XVI Gustav of Sweden is his great-great-grandson, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark is one great-great-granddaughter, and the former Queen Anne-Marie of Greece is another. To describe him as well connected would be ...”

“... your heart and mind have been excited. I must leave that to you,’ Heger told them, as he told Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte’s first biographer, after Charlotte’s death. Heger encouraged the Brontës’ writing, but demanded that they pay attention to their craft. ‘Poet or not … study form,’ he once admonished Charlotte. He often returned their ...”

“... chevelures merging into one. The casting, the lighting and the face and body language that Millais drew out of his actors secured The Princes in the Tower an instant niche in Britain’s national image repertory, where it has remained ever since. Millais’s portraiture could grapple confidently with the auras of the mighty: Tennyson, Gladstone, Disraeli. He ...”

“... bystander and suggested he run along the deck to see if any stray pieces of ice had come on board. Elizabeth Eustis and Martha Eustis Stevenson, sisters from Haverford, Pennsylvania, travelling first-class, were asleep in their cabin. The collision, though almost soundless – ‘like tearing a strip of calico, nothing more’ – woke them up. ...”

“... the essentially corrupt and temporary nature of the Northern Ireland state. Paisley, like Longley, drew a message for the times from St Paul, and it is impossible to read Longley’s early poems without being haunted by ironic premonitions of what was about to happen. And although it is possible to regard ‘No Continuing City’ as a straightforward, if ...”

“... of Harold and Essie Craxton, who tumbled up in a ramshackle household in St John’s Wood. Elizabeth Jane Howard, who knew them all when she was young and later wove them into her Cazalet novels, described the Craxtons as exuding happiness like pollen, which rubbed off. The pianist Harold Isaacs remembered overcrowded Acomb Lodge as ‘a very strange ...”

“... The galleries overlook courtyard gardens, following classical Persian design, and Diba also drew on Persian architecture to create towers shaped like badgirs, or windcatchers. In the desert these provide ventilation; in the museum they allow light to stream in.A curatorial delegation arrived in New York in May 1975 for the first round of ...”

“... Harold Nicolson, found the remains of a great courtyard house that had once played host to Elizabeth I. It was already in ruins when Horace Walpole saw it in 1752 and all that now survived was one low range of buildings and a single great tower. Restoring it was a daunting prospect and Harold pointed out that for the same money they could buy an intact ...”

“... seems to have taken part in a drunken romp which led to his assaulting Maria’s sister-in-law Elizabeth … Tradition has it that Burns was helping re-enact the Roman Rape of the Sabine Women.’ Scott Hogg, in contrast, follows Catherine Carswell’s version and presents the scene as a right-wing plot against radical Rob. The ladies had withdrawn after ...”