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“... who care a great deal for the writers of Eastern Europe, and the experiments of William Carlos Williams and the Beats. I’d first met him when I was a student myself, in the Eighties, when travelling across America by car seemed like the right sort of thing to be doing. There was a gang of us then, and we got jobs working in pizza places or in all-night ...”

“... pleasure – more of that ‘heartfelt felicity’ that Emma Woodhouse finds with Mr Knightley, or Elizabeth Bennet with the handsome Darcy – in remaining with one another. The letters from Austen that Cassandra allowed to survive testify to such a primordial bond. Virginia Woolf observed of Austen’s fiction that ‘it is where the power of the man has to ...”

“... of the grove. I can never read the last couplet without imagining how Frankie Howerd or Kenneth Williams would have delivered it – this is quite deliciously camp, and that word ‘antic’ is also theatrical, for it inescapably carries a memory of Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’. However, as Elizabeth Story Donno ...”

“... the affection of handsome young men with jewels, gold vessels and the like. The surplus left by Elizabeth turned into a deficit of £600,000, an enormous sum. The king was not alone in finding himself stretched. The availability of credit from the City of London meant that many tracts of land long in the hands of the crown or the nobility were converted ...”

“... piece of rhetorical brilliance about the profligacy of Thatcherism. In 1990 he sneered at Raymond Williams as a kindly old fellow from the valleys. In 1999, he savaged an authorised biography of Mandela, creating a stir on the letters page by identifying him – correctly – as a former communist. He rarely lets a response to a piece he has written go ...”

“... about which, of course, we know a good deal more. The usual suspects are close on his heels – Elizabeth I (1533-1603, ‘queen of England and Ireland’), Cromwell (1599-1658, ‘Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland’), Wellington (1769-1852, ‘army officer and prime minister’), Victoria (1819-1901, ‘queen of the United Kingdom of Great ...”

“... more curvy – I am of course referring to her face, on which, unlike Dietrich, Garbo or indeed Elizabeth Taylor (whom she saw as a rival), there isn’t a single straight line. There is no flattening wash over this face. Even Laurence Olivier, who mostly couldn’t stand her, had to concede that every time she appears in The Prince and the Showgirl, she ...”

“... philanthropists and reformers – Cavell is there, and so are Queens Victoria and Alexandra, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Angela Burdett-Coutts. St Joan’s International Alliance, a Catholic body that was founded by suffragettes and is recognised today by both the Vatican and the UN, celebrated its centenary in 2011, and still distinguishes itself by ...”

“... poets: Lowell, Berryman, Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop and Theodore Roethke. The last two were more peripheral, both less overtly confessional, especially Bishop, and not so much on the scene, New York or Ivy League (though Bishop turned up briefly, and memorably, at Harvard). Their work has stood up ...”

“... such a thing as a pure Americanness in poetry. Earlier ‘Redskin’ poets such as William Carlos Williams sought to achieve it, probably, in contradistinction from the European corruptions of men like Eliot. But I find it much more strongly represented in such a post-Eliot poet as John Ashbery, who seems to me a true poet of distraction. The back cover of ...”

“... Emma Bovary, looking longingly at Paris as the escape from the provincialism of Egdon Heath. Elizabeth, in The Mayor of Casterbridge, occasionally lapses into dialect, ‘those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel’, Hardy remarks. Corrected speech is one of the things that sets Tess apart from her impoverished family. Hardy’s heroes and ...”

“... author to a little thing he was hosting. Who was there? Oh, you know, the usual crew: Tennessee Williams, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, and Hemingway’s great chum, the one he called ‘the Kraut’: Marlene Dietrich. ‘You could have knocked me over with a pin,’ Styron wrote to his aunt Edith, ‘when Leo took me over to meet Dietrich and she took ...”

“... with 20th Century Fox negotiated by my expert lawyer, Alan U. Schwartz, who represented Tennessee Williams, Tom Stoppard, Truman Capote and Mel Brooks. ‘May the Schwartz be with you,’ Brooks joked in Spaceballs. He already was.As the plane began its descent, swinging over Santa Clarita, down across the Santa Monica Mountains, then banking briefly over the ...”

“... A wood engraving​ by the illustrator Joan Hassall, who died in 1988, shows Elizabeth Gaskell arriving at the Brontë parsonage. Patrick Brontë is taking Gaskell’s hand; Charlotte stands between them, arms open in a gesture of introduction. We – the spectators, whose gaze Charlotte seems to acknowledge (or is she looking at her father apprehensively?) – stand in the doorway; the participants are framed in the hallway arch, with the curved wooden staircase behind them ...”

“... funny: Cary Grant, as the reformed cat burglar, invites the Lloyd’s insurance agent (John Williams) to have lunch at his villa overlooking the Mediterranean. Grant’s housekeeper serves a delicious meal, the first course of which is a tart with ham, herbs and eggs. ‘It’s a local speciality,’ says Grant, looking immensely sophisticated. ‘They ...”