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“... In Selling Culture (1986), the UCLA cultural historian Debora Silverman excoriated the way Diana Vreeland, then director of the Met’s Costume Institute, had organised the Saint Laurent show as a promotional, opulent, imperialist spectacle of decadent social privilege, the aesthetic embodiment of the Reagan era. There was a room devoted to lavish ...”

“... Laskin relies most heavily in this relatively orderly account of sexual and matrimonial chaos. Diana Trilling outlived Lionel by many a book; Mary McCarthy enjoyed the same revenge on Edmund Wilson; the witches of Eastwick (lacking only their Hardwick) have vented about Robert Lowell. To interview all the exes of Philip Rahv would be an undertaking from ...”

“... an unfair example, because when she notices the shrub behaving like that, the heroine, Lyris Crane, is thinking about Edith Sitwell’s unhappy childhood. Lyris is very recently widowed and herself an artist. On another occasion she hears a suspicious noise in the hall, and ‘her slippery heart hurt as it leapt. As a dark shape bulked into the studio ...”

“... eat the soil now. The first time I saw London was in 1981, just after the wedding of Charles and Diana. I came to Stratford for two weeks to stay with my uncle. It smelled funny – like our ICI-dominated conurbation back home – and it surprised me that a city so full of telegenic hats and pristine flags could also smell of wet coal. But when I went back ...”

“... my homosexuality, that the terrifying, dominating and truly monstrous woman who had done so was Diana Graa. According to Train, Mrs Graa convinced me I couldn’t satisfy her fiendish, feminine desires – convinced me I was no good. Or at least not as good as my older brother Bob. Bob the true child prodigy, Bob the one with perfect pitch etc. Sad to ...”

“... to American poetry ‘the prophetic consciousness it had lost since the conclusion of Hart Crane’s The Bridge’. From the first Howl had a kind of totemic significance, partly as a result of its trial for obscenity, and partly because it drew so clearly and cleverly the lines of battle between the hips and the squares, the holy bums and the ...”

“... of the rich’, and nothing rouses his own gift for truculence so much as a wealthy dimwit – Diana Cooper, for instance, whose ‘capacity for abstract thought’ he memorably declared to be ‘roughly that of a strawberry mousse’ – unless it is what Orwell called the ‘pansy left’. Spender belonged to this class, the antics of which, Carey once ...”

“... the editors at Partisan Review, who began publishing her criticism: Richard Wright, Faulkner, Hart Crane, the Goncourts – Hardwick could turn her hand to almost anything. When Philip Rahv met her, he was struck by her gumption. He asked her what she thought of Diana Trilling: ‘Not much.’ ‘I weighed about ten pounds ...”

“... display this motif – as do Cinderella, the most far-flung of all folk-tales, and the Chinese crane-dance. Its symbolic meaning is a journey to the world of the dead. But if the pervasive recurrence of this motif belongs to a unitary Eurasian mythology, it is anchored in a universal human experience, ‘the self-image of the body’. Asymmetrical ...”