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“... Isadora Duncan refused to be filmed while she danced. The most eager prophet of modern bodily movement avoided the great new vessel of the truth a motion – unwilling, it would seem, to do without the audience rapport that was indispensable to her success. Her reluctance went with her noticeably religious attitude toward her own dancing, and toward art in general ...”

“... There is only one piece of film that shows Isadora Duncan dancing.* It is four seconds long, the very end of a performance, and it is followed by eight seconds in which Duncan accepts applause. This small celluloid footprint – light-struck in the manner of Eugène Atget – contains quite a bit of information ...”

“... and perhaps it was time; her debut as a creative solo performer had been in 1926, when Isadora Duncan and even Loïe Fuller were still alive.But she didn’t die. She recovered, gave up drink, re-dyed her hair and had her face lifted; but without the ability to channel her work through her own flesh, she swiftly became an icon and an ...”

“... the Moscow Art Theatre. There are lighter moments: notably, an account of a dinner-party involving Isadora Duncan, Gordon Craig, Stanislavsky and Olga Knipper. We don’t know what the two Russians thought of Craig locking himself and his secretary into the bedroom in the middle of the meal, but clearly for once they were both upstaged. For the rest, this ...”

“... of NEP, describes their drifting apart after 1922, with Esenin’s brief, unstable marriage to Isadora Duncan and subsequent decline into alcoholism, and ends with a movingly laconic account of Esenin’s last days, before his suicide in 1925. The public didn’t like Mariengof’s version of Esenin – largely because Esenin became even more popular ...”

“... clergyman’s son pondering the Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution and his friendship with Isadora Duncan – and his own adolescent attitude to life, unusual in a man in his late forties. The hero of After My Fashion is a self-portrait. Richard Storm has returned to Sussex from Paris, where he has made a name for himself with his critical ...”

“... she managed to bed just about everybody who was anybody in the sapphic world of her time: from Isadora Duncan, Alla Nazimova, Pola Negri, Tamara Karsavina, Katharine Cornell, Marie Laurencin, Michael Strange and Eva Le Gallienne in the 1920s and 1930s to Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Hope Williams, Libby Holman, Ona Munson (Belle Watling in Gone with ...”

“... partly by deploying photographs of the dancers he knew well: Loïe Fuller, Ruth St Denis and Isadora Duncan. It would be hard to assemble a more fascinating set of early 20th-century performers, or a more talismanic group of images. The photographs at the Courtauld were chosen from hundreds owned by Rodin; they all captured dancers he admired and ...”

“... well. Much talk of improvisatore, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, small or big tits, Akhmatova, Isadora Duncan, suspenders etc. ‘I asked him if he didn’t think it was slightly immoral, mixing reality and fiction,’ one character confides, and inside Thomas’s text the subversive query is triumphantly squashed (‘the trouble with most novels ...”

“... to wreck my body on the earth … It is no accident that California produced our greatest dancers, Duncan and Graham, and fostered the work of St Denis, Doris Humphrey, Maracci and Collins. The eastern states sit in their folded scenery, tamed and remembering, but in California the earth and sky clash, and space is dynamic. Back in New York, after seeing the ...”

“... and she had to revert to Desti. She had barely set foot in Paris before becoming best friends with Isadora Duncan, then cutting a swathe through the more bohemian reaches of the avant-garde with her lyrical interpretations of dance. A good deal of Sturges’s life until the age of fifteen was lived as a junior member of ...”

“... blond-rinsed girls, who go through a mixed routine, from rough-hewn disco-dancing to some Isadora Duncan stuff. They are well-drilled, energetic, and a long way from tickling the erotic; there is also something not quite right about them. Then, abruptly, one girl goes up on her left foot and slowly raises her, right leg out sideways. When it ...”

“... followed reclusiveness and misanthropy. ‘I never go anywhere. I hate human beings,’ he told Isadora Duncan. One might say that his was either the maddest form of sanity or the sanest form of madness. Arthur Miller called him ‘the mad inventor of modern theatre’, in a useful oversimplification. Carl Larsson’s portrait of Strindberg, on the ...”

“... mansion in which every room had been named after a supposed turn-of-the-century guest – Isadora Duncan, Enrico Caruso, Luisa Tetrazzini – and decorated in an appropriate style. She climbed laboriously up to a small ‘chamber’ – it was the Jack London room – in one of the mansion’s towers where, among a plethora of nautical ...”

“... same enthusiasm. Edward Gordon Craig fathered 13 children with eight different women, including Isadora Duncan. (When his and Isadora’s daughter, Deirdre, drowned in the Seine after a motoring accident, Craig failed to attend the funeral.) Like a number of his contemporaries, he welcomed the rise of Mussolini and ...”