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“... categories. The physical arrangement of the Wunderkammern, about which Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park write with great learning, was often calculated to heighten the sense of that heterogeneity, and the objects were typically chosen or fashioned to emphasise category confusion, to exemplify metamorphosis and to produce a dizzying collapse of ...”

“... cleverness of the youthful letters was tempered, but not muzzled, by Asquith’s courtship of Katharine Horner and particularly by his experiences in the trenches. Many of the early letters have traces of what he himself called ‘the prize essay manner’, displayed least agreeably in a disdainful Wykehamist superiority, clever enough but too easily ...”

“... supplying yachts. Flint reckons that in a non-pandemic year around two thousand yachts visit St Katharine Docks, a stone’s throw from the Tower of London. You might pay £100 a night for a berth depending on the size of your boat; long-term moorings can cost £16,000 a year. SKD Marina is part of Blackstone Property Management, an arm of the Blackstone ...”

“... for two nights outside, my solicitor gave me money and a blanket. I slept in a train station and a park.’ Another solicitor, found for him by the Refugee Council, put in for an injunction against the decision to refuse support. It failed, and Ibrahimi was once again on the streets, ‘for fifteen, twenty days’, until he met another Kurdish man, who let him ...”

“... to England from America and was living again in his rooms at 3 Bolton Street, just off Green Park. ‘Instead of superficial contacts with the British upper classes,’ James’s biographer Leon Edel reports, ‘James began to form friendships of a more significant kind – with members of his own class, the writers and artists of London.’ There was ...”

“... starts as a story. A helpless old Russian émigré named Vasily Ivanovich sits on a park bench to recuperate his strength after going to a funeral. The narrator sits down beside him and ‘recruits’ him as just the type needed to fill out a chapter of a novel he has been working on for two years. This trifle manages thus to be a pseudo-story ...”

“... For example, she accompanies her essay with a quotation from Hopper’s interview with the critic Katharine Kuh in 1962: ‘There is a sort of elation about sunlight on the upper part of the house. You know, there are many thoughts, many impulses, that go into a picture . . . I was more interested in the sunlight on the buildings and on the figures than in ...”

“... impressed by Gordimer’s literary transvestism. ‘Do I really want to be a man?’ she wrote to Katharine White, the fiction editor of the New Yorker, in 1958. ‘I can’t believe I do.’ But this allusion to the earlier work, with its heavily ironic title, acts as a caution against the more romantic aspects of Bannerman’s quest, which only occasionally ...”

“... cheerleaders. In a corner, under a high wall that gives away the previous identity of this public park as a decommissioned energy-generating plant, retired workers sway, stiffly and slowly, in t’ai chi ballets. I’m fascinated by the elderly Chinese couple who circle every morning for more than an hour around the perimeter fence of the newly laid, too ...”

“... knew the indestructible irony that plays around life and death: he had seen his surgeon father park a cigar between the toes of a stiff. Nabokov shared the same knowledge. In hospital with chronic diarrhoea and vomiting, he not only observed his own throes, but also an old dying man: ‘all very interesting and useful to me’. Boyd quotes a newspaper ...”

“... in one case, a beau ‘asked her if she wanted to take a walk through Samuel A. Howlett Municipal Park’. And she did, it seems; she did not deem it too exciting. One of her swains reports: I realised I’d actually kissed a girl, though in my case it happened to be Madonna.’ However, when party-going, ‘she guarded her virginity by sometimes wearing a ...”

“... one night on holiday in Spain that her group of closest friends, which included the journalist Katharine Whitehorn and the Conservative peer Heather Brigstocke, had had no idea about her sexuality until she mentioned it. ‘If I had produced a gun and fired it through the roof the reaction couldn’t have been stronger.’ Just to have been a woman who ...”

“... careful and experienced in writing about the film business (he has produced good books on Katharine Hepburn and Marlon Brando in the past). He does his best to like Bogart and Bacall, though he seems a little perplexed by the discovery that they were difficult people, even pains in the neck. Who knows how many readers will care now about their ...”

“... the final few eggs into his mouth.Staying still while looking handsome wasn’t a walk in the park. George Roy Hill, who directed Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, said he was so nervous on set that he always had three changes of shirt and plenty of deodorant to cope with his profuse sweating. There isn’t a hint of these nerves in his ...”

“... My Feet, a short film I’d written with the director John Hancock about touch football in Central Park, had been nominated for an Oscar. (It played with Woody Allen’s Bananas at New York’s Baronet Theatre to brisk business.) In a giddy moment, we’d even taken out one of those bow-wow fuck-off ads in Variety thanking ‘the Industry’ for our ...”