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“... as Marlowe’s revelations floor the decadent rich. The Monkey’s Mask, by the Australian poet Dorothy Porter, takes the transformation of the detective genre a stage further, by writing it in verse. Her detective heroine, Jill Fitzpatrick, is a gay, working-class former cop, who narrates in a hyperactive free-form skitter: Always this  I’ll ring ...”

“... have been in an attic in New Jersey. Then it was bought by the black historian and bibliographer Dorothy Porter Wesley; after her death, it came to auction and to Gates. The catalogue description said that it was ‘uncertain’ that the MS was the work of a black person, but the fact that Wesley had acquired it suggested to Gates that she had a strong ...”

“... Stanley was, after all, often deceived. Jeal thinks he was deceived by his eventual wife, Dorothy (née Tennant), who comes out of this book very badly: resembling ‘a great actress’ who feigned love for him (she really loved Sir Alfred Lyall, but he was married), then wickedly took control of him – never giving him peace to write, forbidding him ...”

“... cartoonist, Goya. Thanks to the pioneering researches of a handful of historians – above all, M. Dorothy George and Herbert Atherton – the basic documentation of the rise of the political print is fairly secure.† The history is, however, full of ambiguity. On the one hand, graphic satire figured ever larger in the arsenal of the fourth estate. In peak ...”

“... implies? Should not future editions include entries on May McKisack (an expert Medievalist), on Dorothy George (who pioneered the scholarly study of cartoons), on Phyllis Deane, the economic historian, and indeed on Natalie Zemon Davis? And, while I am labouring this particular point, should women’s history really be catalogued – as it is here – as ...”

“... 1925, Kurt Schwitters was met first with gales of laughter and then with tears of admiration. Bern Porter, a physicist turned outsider artist, spent the war helping to build the atomic bomb, before turning his back on his career and devoting the rest of his often isolated existence to creating what he called ‘founds’. He rearranged news clippings, magazine ...”

“... the writers have been brought together ‘over what, in some cases, would be their dead bodies’. Dorothy Parker, for instance, says she is ‘a feminist, and God knows I’m loyal to my sex ... But when we paraded through the catcalls of men and when we chained ourselves to lamp-posts to try to get our equality – dear child, we didn’t foresee those ...”

“... a sigh of relief at this autobiography, since it was something, to quote another John’s spoof of Dorothy L. Sayers, ‘to be read behind closed doors’. Though without necessarily taking Orton’s other piece of advice – namely, to ‘have a good shit while reading it’. Osborne, like Orton, had a bleak childhood (or would like us to think so). Both had ...”

“... one running out on them, I’ll just tell them about that pair of Jimmy Choo boots I saw on Net-a-Porter. All they have to do to feel better is to buy them for me. Trust in abundance, guys. Am I beginning to get the hang of this happiness project? Truth number four is ‘You’re not happy unless you think you’re happy.’ This is not just unfathomable but ...”

“... an obsessive labour, a way of life’. Her artless title is taken from a letter Helen Lowe-Porter wrote to Thomas Mann after she became his English translator. She was, she said later, an ‘unknown instrument … which … must … serve him to change the garment of his art into a better one which might clothe her for the marketplace until times ...”

“... of buildings – barns, a dovecote, a farm – that have grown up over the years. In People Dorothy, the lady of the manor, expressly disclaims any pretensions to metaphor her house might have. ‘England with all its faults. A country house with all its shortcomings – the one is not the other.’ In this perfect house such a disclaimer would be much ...”

“... his undergraduate writing, part of a generalised admiration for the world of the New Yorker, Cole Porter musicals and the Algonquin Round Table. I don’t mock the progression. My own was identical. Films implanted his obsession with stardom, the making and wearing of those golden masks with which his favourite performers ...”

“... magic. Here it must be that arresting phrase, the right to play. Like Beaton, the Sitwells, Cole Porter, Nancy Cunard, Noël Coward, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Lady Diana Cooper and countless other hedonistic Jazz Age types, Murphy, de Acosta and Garland took the right to play for granted, as well they might. Puritanism was an anachronism and in some ...”

“... Her topics included writers and fictional characters: the Brontës, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Wordsworth, Hedda Gabler and Hester Prynne (hence ‘Xavier’). Hardwick’s great subject was women – their subjection, their stoicism, their self-reliance – but she wrote about them with a sort of fatalism, a fatalism that characterised her ...”

“... the lead role, a set design by Norman Bel Geddes, and luminaries such as Arthur Rubenstein, Cole Porter, Ivor Novello, Dorothy Parker and Mrs Vincent Astor in attendance on opening night. It closed after a few snaggle-toothed performances. In Jacob Slovak (1923), the one de Acosta play to have some success (John Gielgud ...”