“... was about as Spanish as a boil-in-the-bag paella. She was baptised Elizabeth Rosanna Gilbert at St Peter’s Church in Liverpool on 16 February 1823, though she was probably born two years earlier in County Sligo. Her father, Edward Gilbert, was a soldier. Her mother, Elizabeth Oliver, was the product of an illegitimate union between Charles Silver Oliver, an ...”

“... for Jones’s corpse to be preserved in alcohol and placed in a lead coffin. When General Horace Porter, the US ambassador to France, went looking for it a century later, the only evidence of Jones’s interment was from an article published in Correspondance littéraire in 1859. Despite the refusal of Congress to finance the project, by 1905 the site of the ...”

“... part of 18th-century European culture – and as part of ‘high culture’, in ways outlined by Peter Burke and Robert Darnton. Science and technology can then be distinguished, and theoretical advances, in, say, the earth sciences, are not assumed always to have produced great practical breakthroughs. As one of the contributors, Steven Shapin, neatly turns ...”

“... and his acolytes – has come under heavy fire from Enlightenment champions such as the late Roy Porter. The polarities echo tensions in the period itself, when images of a brave new world of self-governing, go-getting individuals collided with fears of moral anarchy. The elevation of once despised, divinely forbidden desires – for ...”

“... at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, sold out and had adulatory reviews. The Shankars met Cole Porter, Gertrude Stein and Henry Miller, and over the next few years travelled all over Europe and eventually to the US, where Ravi heard Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong, beginning a lifelong fascination with New York.Ravi began ...”

“... be as zealous in stopping people throwing orange peel on the pavement, in case an overburdened porter slipped on it, broke his leg and became unable to feed his family, as they were in chasing after highwaymen. They should stop fishwives throwing the guts of mackerel carelessly away, perhaps to besmirch the white silk stockings of a foreigner who would ...”

“... a connection. Hadman E. was Ernest. From Stilton. A railwayman in Peterborough, an ‘acting porter’, Ernest died on the Somme in 1917 and is listed on the Thiepval Memorial. There was indeed a remote kinship with Anna. Her great-great-grandfather and Ernest’s great-grandfather were brothers. Enough to leave her in tears and send her on an expedition ...”

“... evening to maintain the deceit. Just as the plotters were tucking into their pre-match cheese and porter and loading their pistols, they were stormed by Bow Street constables, followed by heavily armed troops. The conspiracy was busted before they even left Cato Street.Vic Gatrell tells this sorry story with zest and sympathy. He is by inclination a social ...”

“... and perhaps novel about Rupert is that he has no respect at all. Take the case of Lorraine and Peter Landau, a couple in Northwood, who took time from what one presumes was a busy schedule to write to Rupert, having seen him in The Vortex, to comment on ‘the audibility of my performance in rather pompous terms’. Rupert opened the letter while ‘deeply ...”

“... home – not that that would have done us any good. We also stayed together most of the day, with Peter Cook, always avid for news, following each new development and often on the phone to London. On the crucial night, as it was thought, I stayed with Dudley Moore in his Midtown apartment. This he later embellished for chat-show consumption as my having ...”

“... of Seamus Shields in The Shadow of a Gunman. When he was asked to play the part of the railway porter in Beckett’s radio play All That Fall in 1956 he found himself ‘struck tremendously by the writing. It seemed to me profound and yet ironically funny, in a style I had never come across before. I didn’t know then who Beckett was – I’d never heard ...”

“... do for the bedazzling, now-dead she-eminence. The most beautiful photo I downloaded was one that Peter Hujar took of her in the 1970s, around the time of I, Et Cetera. She’s wearing a thin grey turtleneck and lies on her back – arms up, head resting on her clasped hands and her gaze fixed impassively on something to the right of the frame. There’s a ...”

“... when going by train from Leeds to Morecambe on holiday you knew you were nearly there when the porter came along the platform shouting the mysterious invocation ‘Lancaster Green Ayre’.11 March. R.’s Aunty Stella rings from Edinburgh. She was 90 last week and apologises that she hasn’t learned a new Shakespeare sonnet to mark her birthday. However ...”

“... Max Porter​ ’s compact and splendid book, a polyphonic narrative with elements of the prose poem, cracks open a set of emotions that has become spuriously coherent and tractable. Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, in which a being that resembles Ted Hughes’s Crow appears to a bereaved husband and his sons (the father happens to be writing a critical book about Hughes), qualifies as a novel by the familiar logic of its not fitting any other category ...”

“... And he was broke. He was living what Stevens and Swan call ‘an almost feral life’ when he met Peter Lacy. Lacy was handsome, six years younger than Bacon and played the piano in nightclubs. He ‘had no interest in the literary or art world,’ Stevens and Swan write. ‘He did not conceal his dislike for Bacon’s paintings. In fact, his indifference ...”