“... to this London post-punk scene of an international idea of what an avant-garde might be,’ Michael Bracewell explained to Kraus. Acker explored the roots of her own subculture, and the roots of those roots too: Burroughs took her to Genet, who took her to the French and anti-French traditions, both homegrown and that of the anti-colonial ...”

“... left behind were that it should be used in any way possible – short of falling into the hands of Michael Winner – ‘to make money for my boys’: Mark Pearce, her second husband, and Alexander, the couple’s son, born in 1983. As Edmund Gordon says towards the beginning of his biography, Carter was never so widely acclaimed in life as she would be in the ...”

“... hand, were the crowning glory of the century of progress. A White Star Line poster reproduced in Michael Wilkinson and Robert Hamilton’s collection shows the great hulk of the ship, sunlit, belching smoke out of three of its four funnels – the fourth was there only for effect – and cutting a swathe between a small sailing ship and a three-masted square ...”

“... a Russian prison yard, one hand in his pocket, carefully framed by the camera in a horseshoe of black-uniformed convicts hundreds strong, offering them redemption or death if they sign up to join the assault on Ukraine. ‘The first sin is deserting,’ he declares. ‘No one falls back. No one retreats. No one surrenders.’ In clip after clip, he accuses ...”

“... not have been accepted as an improvement on ‘poetry’. Apart from garbled rumours about an all-black Macbeth in Harlem, and a documentary version of Wells’s War of the Worlds which panicked the US Eastern seaboard, this film was all we knew of him, and it hit us out of the blue. But even then, I recall my friends and I detecting a whiff of the brilliant ...”

“... minds of that third-rate decade, the Sixties’ – betrayed a shaky grasp of cultural history. (Michael Foot’s description of Tebbit as ‘a semi-house-trained polecat’ may have revealed an equally shaky grasp of natural history, yet still seemed nearer the mark.) There was no pleasing either side in that divided decade: Arthur Scargill was as hostile ...”

“... Poems. Reading Merrill at length can feel like being trapped in endless rooms full of Ming Dynasty black lacquer furniture with mother-of-pearl inlays, and flowering begonias painted on, along with birds and butterflies alighting on pomegranate stems – it’s exquisitely fashioned, but makes you want to find the sanctuary of a Shaker meeting hall where one ...”

“... spectacle: ‘Kofi and Nane, both enormously attractive and disarmingly modest, the one short and black and the other tall and blonde, made for a dazzling couple: they projected a kind of moral glamour’ (sic). Meisler too dwells on Annan’s status as a ‘social star of New York society’, dining and partying three times a week. But disavowing ...”

“... notary Ser Petracco, the previous year. That she died in 1348 makes her a probable victim of the Black Death. According to a venerable tradition Laura was a Provençal woman called Laure de Noves, born in about 1310. She married Hugo or Hughes de Sade, of a landed family from Le Thor, a few miles south-east of Avignon. The marriage contract is dated 6 ...”

“... a sentimental and claustrophobic soap opera based on a bogus reading of locality. The compacted black-hole set has been devised to swallow segments of authentic geography, the pubs and squares of Hackney. And to compress all that multi-tongued buzz into a single rectangular block where everyone shouts or whispers threats into a mobile ...”

“... didn’t really know or even like but who just happened to be marooned in Oxford out of term.One black mark against Larkin is that he no more cares for the work of Flannery O’Connor than Amis did: ‘The day didn’t get off to a very good start by my reading some stories by “Flannery O’Connor” in the bath … horribly depressing American South ...”

“... de Acosta (1893-1968) was a serious lady ghoul. So lamia-like her sartorial mode – she favoured black silk cloaks and trousers, tricorn hats, blood-red lipstick and cadaverish white face-powder – Tallulah Bankhead was not the only acquaintance to nickname her ‘Countess Dracula’. Yet such was de Acosta’s sinister allure she managed to bed just about ...”

“... pen-work and thick outline done in a gloopy mixture of ink and gum. (‘Outlines cannot be got too black,’ he jotted in his sketchbook in a characteristic spirit of self-exhortation.) The picture is finished off with a varnish that has aged into a rich yellowy-brown: the total effect is sometimes said to resemble an etching, which is true enough, though it ...”

“... in a few paragraphs. She works, as she acknowledges, in the shadow of the extraordinary labours of Michael Millgate, whose revised biography of 2004 is the standard scholarly account. Millgate is invaluable, the definitive authority; but as he himself might admit, his very scrupulousness tends to slow down his narrative, gnarling it in necessary footnotes and ...”