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“... and the extravagant letters, that kept her interested for so many years. With others, such as Katherine Mansfield, the spell worked only for a few moments, but it worked. To T.S. Eliot he was Mr Apollinax, devouring the afternoon with his dry, passionate talk; but apparently the afternoon wasn’t all he devoured with it. And considering that his lovers ...”

“... parish of St George, Canterbury, in February 1564. He was the son of John Marlowe, shoemaker, and Katherine née Arthur, a Dover woman. They had nine children, though only five survived childhood. Christopher was the eldest son, and after the death of his sister Mary in 1568, the eldest child in the family. His father was ...”

“... for me, in my innocence, to read them. One must acknowledge, however, that Richard Cobb is not Frank Kermode, nor Angus Wilson D.P. Walker. I had come knowing what Britain’s preconceived ideas were: her pragmatism and refusal of abstraction, her solitary traditions and diehard taste for erudition and travail honnête, however ...”

“... men and women, are nicer than most folks in fiction, or in fact. They are a lot nicer than Frank Tuohy’s characters. But then, niceness is not all. Some of Tuohy’s stories wander rather mournfully through Maugham country, highlighting various modes of English exile, and reminding us that failure is usually shoddy rather than spectacular, that life ...”

“... all these sentences could have been written by the same person, the person who wrote ‘Frank drops me off outside the sisters’ flat,’ ‘You could hear the kids yelling in the pool,’ ‘I could hear kids on the waste ground behind me,’ ‘The travel-agent smoked in the empty church’ – first sentences, by different writers, from an ...”

“... any scandal, allowing the writer to puff and genuflect and conceal his way to glory. Take Frank Kermode’s Not Entitled, a memoir typical of a generation of men who thought things were best said by not being said at all. Plante, however, is a throwback to the days of Barbara Skelton and the Comtesse de Boigne. In the years covered by his diary, he ...”

“... not only confederates but enemies. Gosse, for example, hated him. Yeats, he fancied, disliked him. Katherine Mansfield was a thick-skinned toady. Of Middleton Murry, toward whom he had once felt quite warmly, he says: ‘I think something conclusive must be done about Murry.’ A month later he is thanking Murry for an exceptionally pleasant weekend, but, as ...”

“... before he found out exactly what occurred in sex between men and women. (This gives extra point to Katherine Mansfield’s joke about Howards End, written quite close to the time of the great discovery: ‘I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatally forgotten umbrella.’) He had his first full homosexual ...”

“... footnotes, that this ‘critic, biographer and man of letters’, born in 1849, was knighted. Frank Schuster (1840-1928), ‘wealthy musiclover and giver of parties’, was still giving parties, and Sassoon spends a great deal of time in his radiance or under his shadow, making the most of the lavish facilities offered but carping to his diary. Butlers ...”

“... a friend, ‘I admit to a taste for certain affectations and ornamental commissions.’ He was as frank as he could be about his artful concealments. His extensive correspondence with his family (just over 650 pages of letters to his mother, father and maternal grandmother), taken together with Mariani’s gruelling account of the parents’ marriage, makes ...”

“... In April 1959 Frank O’Connor wrote to his editor at the New Yorker to say that he had taken ‘the family up to Sligo to see how Yeats was getting on’. Since Yeats had been dead twenty years, he should have been getting on just fine. But: Even he seemed to be disgruntled. Kavanagh the ex-poet ran into me soon after I came home, and the following conversation took place exactly as recorded ...”

“... obvious gaps in this plump epistolary corpus are letters to or from women, in whose company, as Katherine Duncan-Jones has convincingly argued, Sidney seems always to have been most happy, productive and at ease. There are no surviving exchanges with his wife, Frances, or with his sister, Mary, and no letters relating to his time at Wilton House in ...”

“... at the Guggenheim. Designed by the Post-Modern artist Robert Wilson, who has draped the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral ramps with white gauze, bathed the museum in patchouli and musk, and created a Japanese soundtrack to accompany the show, the exhibition is a perfect example of the blend of fashion, art, commerce and academic analysis that marks the ...”

“... to note how few people knew about him, even those who were wise in other ways. In his preface to Frank Harris’s book on Wilde, Shaw made clear that neither he nor his associates, Harris included, knew of Wilde’s homosexuality until he was cross-examined. (This is confirmed by Ford, although he suggested that Wilde was unmasked not at the trial but some ...”

“... from the ensemble’s complicity and literal support of the song’s demeaning lyrics, sung by Katherine Handy (W.C. Handy’s daughter), which include ‘They [Harlemites] just live on dancin’/They never blue or forlorn!/And it ain’t no sin to guzzle down gin!/Now that’s just why darkies were born,’ the last line echoing ‘That’s Why Darkies ...”