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“... woman … In the characterisation of women, the male novelists of those years wrote as though Elizabeth Bennet, Dorothea Brooke, Becky Sharp and Emma Bovary had never been created.She describes Phuong, Fowler’s Vietnamese mistress in Greene’s The Quiet American – a novel that invokes Cyril Connolly’s dictum in Enemies of Promise about the pram in ...”

“... the knighthood in the personal gift of the monarch.When, in November 1947, the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Philip of Greece brought an array of royalties to London, Channon gave a dinner party at which the ten guests included the queens of Spain and Romania, even if neither then reigned in her country. ‘People gasped at the splendour which one rarely ...”

“... Argus. His childhood was privileged and isolated; in 1953, aged eight, he was taken on the Queen Elizabeth to see the Coronation. Argus was rich, powerful and ‘fundamentally dishonest’, with the directors regularly trading in assets which they bought from and sold to the company, always at a profit to themselves. Black’s father was one of the six main ...”

“... nothing less than ‘a substantial sacrifice by states of their freedom of action’. David Maxwell-Fyfe, who led the negotiations that led to the European Convention (and went on to be home secretary in the 1951 Conservative government) welcomed the Convention as ‘a simple and safe insurance policy’ in favour of ‘a minimum standard of democratic ...”

“... legitimation – Bidart makes the case against it when he turns up a 1959 letter of Lowell’s to Elizabeth Bishop: ‘In the hospital I spent a mad month or more rewriting everything in my three books’ – Lord Weary’s Castle, The Mills of the Kavanaughs, Life Studies. ‘I arranged the poems chronologically, starting in Greek and Roman times and finally ...”

“... platform, approached by a broad staircase. ‘Dreamy and emotional,’ the English architect Maxwell Fry commented, ‘but far too resigned to be real.’ Already, here was a hint that Utzon might turn away from conflict when, inevitably, his originality collided with meaner minds. Only one entry, not Utzon’s, repeated some of the technical daring of ...”

“... prejudice?), and then ‘the sea full of floating brown pennies of oil’, an image and a phrase Elizabeth Bishop might not have disdained, with its quiet metaphorical swell. The rhythms and play of sounds, the subtle presence of things remembered in things seen, convey a genius for observation that one doesn’t think of as Forsterian. The Bishop-like ...”

“... altogether sinister ‘period’ sprite, the celebrity-chasing and deeply closeted impresaria Elsa Maxwell.) All three of Cohen’s subjects were intelligent, ambitious, creative, forceful women blessed with charisma, charm and near inexhaustible energy, not to mention the financial wherewithal to create around themselves what their biographer calls, tactfully ...”