“... a glamorous young aristocrat (he was 19 when Venus and Adonis appeared) who was also the ward of William Cecil, Lord Burghley. This is the way ambitious Elizabethan poets got on in the world: they found a generous aristocratic patron, whose taste, praised in a lavish dedication, in turn constituted a marketable endorsement. That this worked for ...”

“... bowdlerise this?’) The collection had been slated for publication a decade earlier, but Dudley Ward, one of the other trustees, complained that even Keynes’s version was insufficiently sanitised. Christopher Hassall was asked to write the authorised biography in part because, as Nigel Jones notes in his own biography of Brooke, Hassall’s lengthy Life ...”

“... Beat the Devil. He, too, is ruthless and unsmiling, and finding Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre and Robert Morley cast up on his shores, plans to have them all shot. Bogart, however, discovers the sheikh’s soft spot, a secret passion for Rita Hayworth, and saves their lives by promising the humourless young man an introduction to ‘the peerless Rita’ (the ...”

“... for anyone who has not done it. We can know her preparations. The ones who were useful to her: Robert Lowell (her teacher and the author of the introduction to the US edition of her posthumous collection Ariel), Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Stevie Smith. Adrienne Rich, envied and wrestled with as an equal artist. Eliot and Yeats, her early ...”

“... scene-setting picture of Bowie at home featured black candles and doodled ballpoint stars meant to ward off evil influences. Bowie revealed an enthusiasm for Aleister Crowley’s system of ceremonial magick that seemed to go beyond the standard, kitschy rock star flirtation with the ‘dark side’ into a genuine research project. He talked about ...”

“... the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly spottable. For those hitting the right places in Manhattan, Sontag sightings were as recurring and oddly reassuring as Warhol sightings, as ...”

“... options (food which is brought in and heated up on site), there are ‘enhanced ward-based kitchen services’ (this turns out to mean such things as toasters and kettles), plus the delights of the food court, with its burger chains and sandwich outlets. Addenbrooke’s has responded to customer complaints that none of this food is ...”

“... Morris scholar John Drinkwater, as though to oppose it would be derisive of the common mood. Robert Byron, less precious than usual, regretted that ‘according to official and ecclesiastical standards … a bit of the old Roman wall is of more importance than Nash’s Regent Street, and one ruined pointed arch than all Wren’s churches put ...”

“... a coffee percolator. I slanted off to the right, ashamed of intruding on this high-rise maternity ward, and the birds sat tight. Across the 800-foot gulf of Sloc Chiasigeo nearby, puffins whirred and kittiwakes uttered their name precisely as they stitched the air with their flight paths. Shags with stylish erectile crests like Oriental actors’ stood to one ...”

“... Lacks. Click. The American Congressional Record. In Memory of Henrietta Lacks – Hon. Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr (Extension of Remarks – 4 June 1997) Henrietta Lacks was born in 1920 in Clover, Virginia. At the age of 23 she moved to Turner’s Station, near Baltimore, Maryland, joining her husband David. She had five children, four of whom ...”

“... White’s face that challenges the viewer. ‘Black and white are the colours of photography,’ Robert Frank once remarked. ‘To me they symbolise the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected. Most of my photographs are of people; they are seen simply, as through the eyes of the man in the street. There is one thing the ...”

“... writers he writes about. He consistently makes claims for a necessary modesty in the critic, to ward off any suspicion that the critic could in any way be rivalrous with or envious of the writers he depends on. At the beginning of this book, for example, he tells us that he never met Eliot, ‘but I like to think that in my two books on his art, T.S. Eliot ...”

“... lives. Scotland is a place where cultural artefacts and past battles – the Stone of Destiny, Robert Burns, Braveheart, Bannockburn – have more impact on people’s sense of moral action than politics does. The people have no real commitment to the public sphere, and are not helped towards any such commitment by the dead rhetoric of the young ...”

“... satire and after. He asks me if we ever had any alternative titles to Beyond the Fringe, which was Robert Ponsonby’s contribution and not popular with us at the time. I can’t think of any but J. Miller later remembers ‘At the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ...”

“... novel – is of a mass of life, work, achievement, suffering, moral uplift and death. Mrs Humphry Ward, for instance, whose life Sutherland is writing, ‘paid a personal price for the terrible labour which it took her to write in the form of crippling physical disorders, and never enjoyed good health again for the rest of her life’. His sympathy for such ...”