“... universities from the mid-1960s onwards and, after separating from Jess Paley, married the writer Bob Nichols. She also published three books of fiction, though the novel her publishers hoped for never materialised. It seems fair to say that the short story was her form. The talent for nonchalance and compression that allows her to stretch out a brief chat to ...”

“... rest of the world’, yet attach no stigma to ‘base cupidity’. Greed was – and is – just fine. Take the celebrated land grab of 22 April 1899. Thousands of people lined up along the Oklahoma border and at high noon, as federal agents sounded trumpets, surged into the territory and snatched whatever land they could. Today Oklahoma proudly calls itself ...”

“... As far as Morrissey was concerned, as long as you didn’t eat meat (and had nice hair) it was fine by him if you were a demented gangland killer. The song represented a dandy’s only excursion into morality. Matthew Herbert inherits a genre that has become both diluted and specialised – two strains of oversophistication. Instead of resisting these ...”

“... Zappa didn’t do drugs. He used junk imagery as part of the weave: ‘Wanna buy some mandies, Bob?’ He was teasing the hippie manifesto, ripping it apart (the Marxist interpretation begins to make sense). Like Charles Manson – the dimestore, reformatory version – Zappa pushed satire a tad beyond acceptable limits, appearing to be precisely the thing ...”

“... mind us, son,’ said the woman nearest, with a cough. ‘Not at all. No problem. It’s fine.’ My mother and the women exchanged looks and smiles. Alice was great; she seemed so alive and well-tuned. She looked like she knew her way around herself. And here was the person she wanted to be. Her hair all layered and tinted in a shop. Her make-up ...”

“... Churchill’s indignation, and of his own spiritualist leanings, have been enough to make the case bob back into public consciousness every few years. As Malcolm Gaskill says, ‘we inherit ancestral tales reworked by each generation to make their truth powerful rather than precise, moral rather than empirical.’ Among the majority today, reverence for ...”

“... my only contribution a muttered suggestion to Nick Hytner that Rupert Graves’s ad lib ‘I’m fine, I’m fine’ would be more in period if he said: ‘It is no matter, no matter.’ I watch Nigel H. rehearse the pisspot scene, then walk round the garden with Mark Thompson before buying some plants on sale in the ...”

“... by surprise. One evening in 1967, he was working in his studio at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts when he found himself imagining the wind wafting through one of his canvases: ‘Oh, a moving painting.’When Lynch died earlier this year, aged 78, from complications relating to emphysema following the fires in Southern California, he had directed ...”

“... was one of the hits of the New Review cabaret at the ICA during Poetry International, 1973. ‘Bob Lull’ was first encountered there reading his newly composed ‘Notes for a Sonnet’. Later in the evening, he appeared, unable to leave well or ill alone, with the poem rewritten – ‘Revised Notes for a Sonnet’ – and then in a third appearance ...”

“... has now set out to rescue its reputation from posterity. In his account, it was embarked on with fine intentions, even if it was conducted with carelessness. It dragged on for two decades and ended in a loss, but only because ‘every president who oversaw the war made major strategic errors’: Bush decided to invade Iraq; Obama announced the timeline for ...”

“... with sharp eyes that were glued to other people’s keyholes. That was why Brockett wrote such fine plays, such cruel plays.’ Like Valérie Seymour (a character based on the American lesbian Natalie Barney, a well-known hostess in Paris), Brockett doesn’t particularly want to be ‘normal’, believes that ‘loneliness’ is not inevitable and that ...”

“... Mrs William James, the formidable widow of Henry James’s elder brother, moving ‘in a cloud of fine discretions and hesitations and precautions’. She disliked Edith Wharton ‘thoroughly – and morbidly’, as Edel put it, and this meant that Wharton or anyone else deemed disreputable could not be involved in any aspect of the estate. Miss ...”

“... Even allowing for the low season, the coast has a desolate air. A few heads in bathing caps bob in the water. The seafood restaurant where I have lunch with the novelist Efrosini Camatsos, recently made redundant from her job as a university lecturer under an edict requiring all departments with more than 20 tenured staff to sack all teachers on ...”

“... after the surgery I vomit green gunk. ‘Don’t worry!’ I exclaim as I retch. ‘It will be fine! It’s just like The Exorcist,’ I say, before anyone else can. And so I spin away, back into the 1970s; I am easily parted from the present day. I remember the cinema queues and the evangelicals working their way along the jeering lines, trying to ...”

“... have been a clergyman in a Jane Austen novel.) A younger son of an eccentric landowning father, ‘Bob’ was born with a cleft palate which made comprehensible speech difficult for him and which, according to an associate, rendered him ‘seemingly little fitted for the utterance of any doctrine which could be deemed dangerous to social welfare’. His father ...”