“... had been caused by a downed weather balloon. It wasn’t until 1994, more than a decade after Charles Berlitz and William Moore’s book The Roswell Incident (1980) had spawned a new generation of conspiracy theories, that the Clinton administration fessed up: the crash was related to a secret surveillance programme, in which balloons had been equipped ...”

“... Crane, for one, was in no doubt about it. ‘He’s the prime ram of our flock,’ he insisted to Allen Tate in the summer of 1922. Tate was initially puzzled by the phrase, as well as by various other ‘signals’ his friend was making, but eventually came to understand Crane’s drift: ‘In those days,’ he later commented, ‘a lot of people like Hart ...”

“... sympathetic reader with just a bit more experience than his own. He found one. ‘It is really Charles Olson I must thank for whatever freedom I have as a poet,’ Creeley remembered, ‘and I would value him equally with Pound and Williams.’ Olson and Creeley began corresponding in 1950 – Williams seems to have put them in touch. Olson was then a ...”

“... Even his own so-called autobiography, My Wonderful World of Slapstick (1960), co-written with Charles Samuels, bowdlerised the evocative sludge of his talk and his harrowing, sodden years in the wilderness. Keaton couldn’t explain himself or his context. Words weren’t his language; he spoke in action. In one of many piquant anecdotes in James ...”

“... Bowles and John F. Kennedy. The right wing of the organisation was awash with antisemitism and Charles Lindbergh worship, but most of its followers eventually accepted the task of defeating Nazism. Arriving at Yale after the war, Buckley and his fellow conservative students knew that they faced a more unifying foe in Soviet communism. Buckley strutted the ...”

“... Kossuth; from the brilliant conservative liberal social theorist, historian and politician Alexis-Charles-Henri-Clérel de Tocqueville, to the troubled priest Félicité de Lamennais, whose ultimately unsuccessful struggle to reconcile his faith with his politics made him one of the most famous thinkers in the pre-1848 world; from George Sand, who refused to ...”

“... for Girl Crazy (the last of her musicals with Rooney). ‘Embraceable You’ was choreographed by Charles Walters, a Broadway dancer and choreographer who would direct Easter Parade and Summer Stock. In the scene, Garland’s character has been given a white piano for her birthday: she sits on it and is wheeled round the room by a crowd of young men in dinner ...”

“... by Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins, which has published the Tolkien oeuvre since taking over Allen and Unwin in 1990. Humphrey Carpenter’s 1977 authorised biography and his 1981 edition of the Letters were also originally published by Allen and Unwin and are now with HarperCollins.I don’t want to defend Tolkien or ...”

“... occupied a senior role at Maison Worth, the French fashion house opened by an Englishman, Charles Frederick Worth (a Galliano avant la lettre), though that wasn’t until after her time at Vogue. Worth plays an important part in the Vogue story, though, and in the story of fashion altogether. Le Grand Worth, the first couture auteur, started the ...”

“... would rather be a more orthodox duo than part of the ménage. At this, Riding – described by Allen Tate as ‘the maddest woman’ – flipped. When the four of them met to talk things through in April 1929 she threatened suicide unless Phibbs returned to them. Phibbs called her bluff, but unfortunately Riding wasn’t bluffing. With a magnificently ...”

“... novelist must arrange the facts to entertain his readers.’ (In one of his parodies, Woody Allen has Maugham advising: ‘At the end of an interrogatory sentence, place a question mark. You’d be surprised how effective it can be.’) Waugh described him as a master of ‘creating the appetite for information . . . withholding it until the right ...”

“... about touch football in Central Park, had been nominated for an Oscar. (It played with Woody Allen’s Bananas at New York’s Baronet Theatre to brisk business.) In a giddy moment, we’d even taken out one of those bow-wow fuck-off ads in Variety thanking ‘the Industry’ for our nomination. My trajectory seemed as straight and clear as the plane’s ...”

“... cases this was her father: we might think of Christine de Pizan, whose father was astrologer to Charles V of France, or Damaris Masham, whose father was Ralph Cudworth, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge from 1645. Anna Maria Van Schurman began her Latin tract on Women’s Aptitude for Knowledge and Higher Learning (or, as the English translation ...”

“... built, garrulous man in his mid-sixties. A pupil at Gordonstoun at the same time as Prince Charles, cousin to a baronet with a large estate in Suffolk, he combines a confident, commanding air and the love of a good story with a peevish ability to articulate complaints in such a way that aligns his personal disadvantage with the disadvantage to the ...”

“... instead of ‘with’ and ‘thru’ instead of ‘through’: Emily Dickinson via Charles Bukowski; Artaud and Bataille laced with American me-first and can-do. Like many rock acts, she’d had years to dream up her world-shut-your-mouth arrival, then suddenly had no time at all to patch together a follow-up. Only ten months on from ...”