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“... in life, Edie Parker, who would become Kerouac’s first wife. Friends described her as resembling Barbara Stanwyck, not just in looks, it would seem from the book, but in manner: Janie has a mouth on her. In one domestic scene, Ryko and Janie are in the bedroom while Phillip is crashing on the couch. Al has just fled the apartment after Janie threw a book at ...”

“... fire is beautiful and blood a vital and splendid red . . . (this from the preface to Major Barbara). In darkest London appearances could be deceptive. Those belligerent women who ambushed the hapless male on his way to the public house were not, as might be supposed, harpies eager to lure him into more vicious courses. They were Salvationist ...”

“... his Hollywood hustle as an agent in the mid-1950s, representing the interests of Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, Joseph Cotten and many lesser lights in the studio firmament. Those of us who knew Clancy – he died in July 2017 in Los Angeles at the age of ninety – can attest that he was a tummler of note, a real-life Zelig who ...”

“... drinking with them at the Cedar Bar, Koch, Ashbery and O’Hara, together with James Schuyler and Barbara Guest, were labelled the New York School of poets. While, in truth, these writers didn’t form anything so well defined as a school, they influenced and encouraged one another and had a shared antipathy to the stuffy academic verse of the time. Koch ...”

“... end of his life wore dark glasses, ‘for no apparent reason’, as Carpenter says, but perhaps to ward off the sight of things) decided nothing at all, or simply did not know why he acted as he did: that in the general pattern of his life the crossing of the Atlantic was a significant non-event. Poe’s famous story of the Purloined Letter tells of an object ...”

“... of the 20th century. They may be right. Norma Jeane Mortensen was born in June 1926 in the charity ward of Los Angeles General Hospital. Her mother Gladys Baker was now and again mad, leaving her daughter troubled but free to dream up an alternative life, and to develop her vital allure reading movie magazines. Norma Jeane had a keen sense of how to conquer ...”

“... Four, but for the closely related cases of the Maguire family, the Birmingham Six, Judith Ward? What did it mean for the system of justice in England? Some years earlier, in a judgment in the Birmingham Six case, Lord Denning, the Master of the Rolls, had summed up the broader significance of such a reversal. If the six men win, it will mean that the ...”

“... was remarkably close-mouthed about the hard facts of her marriage. Meyers relies on her daughter, Barbara Barr, for two bold claims: that Lawrence was sterile from about the age of 16, and that he had a physical affair with William Henry Hocking in 1917. Yet when Barr denies something that Meyers wants to believe – Frieda’s sexual encounter with a ...”

“... doors or even toilet seats, their ‘stone floors … saturated with urine’. The Jungian analyst Barbara Robb’s book Sans Everything, published in 1967, describes her visits to – and eventual prison break of – an elderly friend trapped and abused in a geriatric ward. Accounts such as these have, over the years, made ...”

“... first used during the French conquest of Algeria in the 19th century, and as the historian Stuart Ward has shown, was widely adopted after the First World War by European intellectuals as they reckoned with imperial decline. From their perspective, decolonisation was the natural telos of empire, and the rise of a post-imperial world order would represent not ...”

“... overdrawn at the bank. In 1929 Helen went ‘home’, and Liz was born in October. (Her sister Barbara, then aged eight, was at an English convent school.) When Geoffrey joined them a month or two later it was clear that something had to change. He looked for a position of some kind but without success. A deal was struck with his elder brother, Gordon, a ...”

“... in learning Old Church Slavonic or translating Rimbaud. Meanwhile, pioneering scholars like Barbara Tuchman, Frank Manuel and George Whalley mined gold year after year from the lodes of ore in the libraries.The roots of this bookish postwar New York, as Denise Gigante shows in Book Madness, stretched back deep into the 19th century. Some of them also ...”

“... Unabombers without typewriters – while others shine for a time then disappear. Marion Barbara (‘Joe’) Carstairs, the subject of Kate Summerscale’s vastly entertaining new biography, The Queen of Whale Cay, would seem to fall into the latter category. In the Twenties, Carstairs (1900-93) was briefly yet wildly celebrated as the ‘fastest ...”

“... one of his generals – with Kissinger featuring as Ribbentrop: a tactical deal with one enemy to ward off dangers from another. Deng, however, sought more than this. His aim was strategic acceptance within the American imperial system, to gain access to the technology and capital needed for his drive to modernise the Chinese economy. This was the ...”

“... not worth caring about at the time, they have not been thought worthy of remembrance either. The Ward is a memorial of sorts. It’s a collection of Gideon Mendel’s photographs of four patients on the Aids wards at Middlesex Hospital in London – John, Ian, Steven and André, all of whom died – over the course of a few weeks in 1993, interspersed with ...”