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“... In the spring of 1907, a few weeks after Edith Wharton had met Morton Fullerton in Paris, she described him to a mutual friend as ‘very intelligent, but slightly mysterious, I think’. Eight years later, by which time her passionate affair with Fullerton was long over, Henry James, in one of his last letters to her, confirmed her first thoughts about the man who had fascinated them both ...”

“... say, Dostoevsky’s Mr Golyadkin in The Double. Miller’s book has an atmosphere at once like Scott and like Proust, full of marvels, full of shrewdness and of humour, its perspective all-embracing. For one thing, it redefines and reinstates the concept of escapism. Hawthorn’s shorter book is more avowedly clinical in its approach, often equally ...”

“... colony – the Berensons, the Actons, Janet Ross, Vernon Lee, with their house-guests such as Edith Wharton and Percy Lubbock – that Iris spent her girlhood. It was a society with a raging appetite for gossip, and before long Sybil had become almost their favourite subject: her dazzling wardrobe, her hypochondria, her high-pitched chatter and ...”

“... Edith Wharton’s ‘background’ – the word is her own – has always seemed improbable for a future novelist. Persistent rumours that she was not the daughter of George Frederic Jones but the illegitimate offspring of a Scottish peer or an English tutor clearly attest to a sense that there was something otherwise inexplicable about this ambitious daughter of Old New York ...”

“... Some time in 1970 or 1971, I was picking boring books at random off my employer’s shelf – I was an au pair in Barcelona – when I opened a novel that had me laughing, and transfixed, by the bottom of the first page. My ignorance meant that I was one of the few people to discover One Hundred Years of Solitude without all that baggage of pleasures foretold ...”

“... On a winter’s evening in 1803, James Hogg turned up for dinner at the home of Walter Scott. The man his host liked to call ‘the honest grunter’ was shown into the drawing-room, where a pregnant Mrs Scott was resting on a sofa. Unsure of the protocol in these toney surroundings, and deciding to take his cue from the hostess, Hogg flopped onto an adjoining sofa, smirching the chintz with his dung-spattered boots ...”

“... as it sounded so familiar, but it turns out the music was specially commissioned, from Julian Scott.) Montages of film clips play throughout on further screens, concocting essence of Hollywood in several flavours: romance, western, fantasy, history, sci-fi, thriller, noir. But the same costumes look very different on screen; the face, the gestures, and ...”

“... exemplified in The Great Gatsby. Gatsby is the ideal person to be talked about, and Nick Carraway, Scott Fitzgerald’s narrator, come to New York from the Middle West, can both identify with Gatsby as a figure of mystery and charm, and also consider him objectively as a focus for speculation. Gossip and speculation go together. Anthony Powell’s ...”

“... Thomas Wolfe and T.S. Eliot and – judging by the appearance of ‘ceaselessly’ here – F. Scott Fitzgerald:This was the thing that drew men and women together: not the meeting of minds nor of spirits, not the conjunction of bodies in the dark insanity of copulation – none of these. It was the tenuous need to create a bond, a tie more fragile than ...”

“... neglect, ‘did some good’, and acknowledges that R.W.B. Lewis’s extraordinary biography of Edith Wharton, the first to take her seriously as a major writer, ‘remains a good book’, her readings of male biographers and critics are generally harsh. She minimises the impact of discreditable information in biographies of men, arguing that ‘only ...”

“... Sovereignty: supremacy in respect of power, domination or rank; supreme dominion, authority, or rule. OED Without conflicting mental reservations, international agreements would be impossible. French diplomatic maxim Christopher Francis Patten, Hong Kong’s last governor, famously wept just before he left aboard the royal yacht Britannia at midnight on 30 June, while sirens whooped and rockets soared over Asia’s most stunning harbour ...”

“... Scott Fitzgerald​ spent his declining years in ‘a hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement’. Hollywood, he complained in 1940, was ‘a dump, in the human sense of the word. Everywhere there is … either corruption or indifference.’ He used to wear a dark topcoat and homburg; ‘his outfit and pallor,’ his secretary Frances Kroll recalled, ‘were alien to the style and warmth of Southern California – as if he were not at home here, had just stopped off and was dressed to leave on the next train ...”

“... and possessions was solemnised by Southey and Coleridge in joint marriage to a pair of sisters, Edith and Sarah Fricker – a lucky shot for Southey, very much less so for Coleridge. The commune that never took shape is now embalmed in a few poems and the Platonic heat of a frank correspondence; but the friends worked steadily in Bristol in 1795, from an ...”

“... a characteristic military balls-up.’ Early in April a new wireless operator, Sergeant Kenneth Scott, was parachuted in to join Frank, while Scott’s code-book was dropped to a wholly different unit ‘somewhere in Thrace’ – and this at a time when the unit’s headquarters were being transferred from Cairo to Bari ...”

“... of the erratic, often inebriated behaviour of Carson McCullers, a literary prodigy to set beside Scott Fitzgerald in the previous generation. (McCullers, married to a bisexual man, was frequently enamoured of women who sometimes, but more often didn’t, welcome her effusive advances.) Of the trio, Flannery O’Connor, who published her first novel Wise ...”