“... some fairly celebrated figures in the lesbian haut monde. A friend of mine once had dinner with Elizabeth Bishop and her lover. Another met Marguerite Yourcenar. At Yale in the 1980s one of Blakey’s best friends slept with – well, perhaps you can guess. (True – the closet case actress!) Someone else I know went to a party in a Chicago highrise and ...”

“... took a job as a social worker and continued to write, eventually showing Second-Class Citizen to Elizabeth Stevens of Curtis Brown, who had the good idea of sending it to Allison and Busby, run by Margaret Busby, the UK’s first Black woman publisher. ‘Here was a group of people around my age who were talking of what ...”

“... out of the most hideous of crimes) to the pleasure she was said to have taken in murdering Martin Brown and Brian Howe? Again: how could anyone know? Given the profit that these papers were making out of their horror at her profit (an obvious point), not to say out of the horror they drew their readers into – given, that is, their own traffic in the ...”

“... he said, “I want a new one.” The one he wanted cost £900. We bought it.’Nicholas Paget-Brown​ , who was then the leader of the council, lives alone not far from the Fulham Road. His gentle manners precede him, in the style of a decently prepped, slightly fogeyish man of the 1950s, and he acts as if he might find the modern world fascinating were ...”

“... What must Dylan make of this meaningless buzz? Robert Browning wrote to Elizabeth Barrett that he had never lacked ‘a real set of good hearty praisers’: ‘No – what I laughed at in my “gentle audience” is a sad trick the real admirers have of admiring at the wrong place – enough to make an apostle swear. That does make ...”

“... 1987); the excellent multi-author collection Aids: The Burden of History, edited by Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox; Dennis Altman’s Aids and the New Puritanism. To the extent that Sontag’s essay links with those discussions and with the pleas you can read every week in liberal newspapers and journals – pleas against moralism and ...”

“... powers, but he opens this expanded version of his 2012 Gifford Lectures with a Father Brown story, ‘The Oracle of the Dog’: by howling at a certain time, the animal gives the priestly sleuth the clue to the murder weapon. Chesterton was consciously taking off from an earlier tale, Conan Doyle’s ‘Silver Blaze’, in which a guard dog fails ...”

“... inviting the reader ‘to a vast and gusty demolition site … where he gives you a jam jar of brown whey and a bowlful of turnips and eels’.) In his role as host and counsellor to the young, Amis comments on his work in progress, like the narrator of London Fields, in interstitial chapters filled with writing advice and ‘what Gore Vidal used to call ...”

“... on Carney’s struggle to join the elite of Harlem society – the world of his in-laws. Elizabeth, Carney’s wife, was raised on Striver’s Row with notches on the doorframes marking her growth; now she lives in a ‘dark apartment with a back window that peered out onto an air shaft and a front window kitty-corner to the elevated 1 ...”

“... Thomas Hardy, Mikhail Sholokhov and T.E. Lawrence, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf – this is just a small sampling. Basically, he read his way through the Marylebone public library. He periodically put this marathon on hold to sprint through examinations. What on earth was he doing? Fending off the boredom ...”

“... Bill’ Sutherland, had a reputation every bit as evil as that of Alastair Campbell or Gordon Brown’s frightful pair, Charlie Whelan and Damian ‘McPoison’ McBride. Nor was it always the PM’s press spokesmen who dripped the poison. At the time of Suez, Eden’s spokesman, William Clark, was startled to get a call from the Tory whips’ office ...”

“... darker by the books which, regardless of their contents, had been bound in heavy boards of black, brown or maroon embossed with the stamp of Leeds Public Libraries. This grim packaging was discouraging to a small boy who had just begun to read, though more discouraging still was the huge and ill-tempered, walrus-moustached British Legion commissionaire who ...”

“... fixates on her English teacher, Miss Maxfeld, an unmarried 37-year-old with a moustache and clunky brown shoes. To get Miss Maxfeld to notice her, Lynn writes self-aggrandising essays and swears in class. It works, but not in the way she expects. ‘You must be very unhappy,’ Miss Maxfeld says, having called her into her office. Instead of chastising ...”

“... in the Austenesque way (‘to be sensible of something’); refers to Pushkin being in ‘a brown study’ and suffering from ‘the ague’; and mentions that Pushkin and his boisterous mates one night ‘kicked up a terrible bobbery’. This is a big book, but it has a rakish, propulsive air, not unlike Pushkin’s glittering short novels and ...”

“... broken into the house of Sir Walter Cope. There was the woman from Finsbury accused of ‘cozening Elizabeth Barnes of certain money for a little powder in a paper’: she had promised that Elizabeth ‘should have her purpose of musicon by carryenge the powder about her’, apparently meaning it would attract some musician ...”