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“... and I would starve to death.’ Following the Paris season Diaghilev took him to Venice, for what Lucy Moore in her new biography describes as ‘an unconventional honeymoon’. In 1910, the god of the dance returned to Paris. This time he starred in Schéhérazade. The fun-loving Queen Zobéide, played by the extraordinary-looking Ida ...”

“... in a truth – and it seems there’s nothing less logical than the truth.’ They are Jerry and Lucy Warriner, happily married, indeed made for each other, as the film goes on to show, although he needs to escape from his bliss now and again. He’s been in New York while pretending to be in Florida, not up to much, as far we can tell, apart from exercising ...”

“... play Beethoven sonatas ‘with spirit’. There are, I think, only three pianists in the novels: Lucy Honeychurch, a mysterious Miss Quested who plays MacDowell, though inaudibly, in Howards End, and, perhaps surprisingly, Leonard Bast, also of that novel. Bast plays, but, according to the manuscript, ‘badly’. Before the book reached print this had ...”

“... some of the most concrete aspects of the book are provided by the dialogue, which, as in Lorrie Moore or Deborah Eisenberg, often contains much of the stories’ movement as it delivers funny little zaps to the main character’s perspective. In ‘Parrot’, a young woman working as a temp laughs at a co-worker – ‘every office must have someone sad to ...”

“... Americans are not in the driving seat dictating the direction. In the stunning memoir of Marianne Moore, this preoccupation is, if anything, more pronounced. Again, there is the same mixture of tactful respect, forbearance, even admiration, and a wry agnosticism. The absolutes promulgated by Miss Moore (‘we called each ...”

“... or perhaps understood the idea of achieving effects by compression or omission. Nothing in Robin Moore’s book bears directly on the literary merits of the Quartet, although he thinks that the TV serial lost much of ‘the texture of testimony’, the ‘intimation of character’. He also, however, quotes John Bayley’s view, similar to the one expressed ...”

“... union with one of the visiting English aristocracy. Unfortunately, George foists his aunt, Mrs Lucy Brankston of Goulburn, a descendant of true pioneers, on the Women’s Advisory Committee as guest of honour, and Aunt Lucy makes a great stand against ‘ancient oppression and snobbery’ by declining all honours and ...”

“... about the puzzle that concludes Villette? Did Paul Emanuel survive the storm and return to marry Lucy Snowe? Or was he drowned? Charlotte Brontë produces a subtle variation on the gross Thackerayan formula. The ‘kind heart’ and ‘sunny imagination’ is allowed to conceive ‘the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror. Let them picture ...”

“... to applaud in them evidence of a strenously physical relationship with paint. Thus Mali Morris, Lucy Ellmann tells us, works ‘with acrylic on unstretched canvas on the floor ... pulling gobs of paint a little way or densely caking colour on, with rough or gentle strokes. The paint sometimes seems to have flitted across, barely swooping low enough to make ...”

“... Rupert Thomson’s​ new novel follows the contours of a remarkable life. Lucy Schwob, born in 1894 to a cultured and prosperous Nantes family, moved to Paris in 1920, where she developed strong links with the Surrealist movement and adopted the name Claude Cahun. Though she produced work in a number of media, and in her lifetime was known as a writer, she is now remembered for her photographic self-portraits, mainly taken in the 1920s, which stage her in various personae (aviator, buddha, doll, angel ...”

“... 1980s – most of them apparently produced in the 1920s and 1930s with the assistance of Marcel Moore, the lesbian companion with whom she lived as a recluse on the island of Jersey between 1937 and 1954 – the wildly androgynous artist can be seen vamping it up in a boggling array of cross-sex get-ups. Long before dyke-daddy chic Cahun and ...”

“... ability – he wrote the Dial’s wry unsigned ‘Comment’ column, and poetry that Marianne Moore praised as ‘reflective, bi-visioned and rather wilfully unconventional’ – but his most important work was as a patron, not a promoter. He left the hawking to people like Ezra Pound, ‘that agitated agitator’, ‘official barker outside the tent ...”

“... laid down around you, you forget about freedom shrinking at your back.’ It’s an image Lorrie Moore might be proud of. In another compelling story, ‘Isolation’ by Lucy Hayden, an unwelcome cousin who comes to visit a house of bereaved teenagers is ‘loud and talkative and moved through us like a walking television ...”

“... Changing Places and Small World. Now, all around the large cabin, other refugees from Roger Moore in For Your Eyes Only and from Gene Wilder in The Woman in Red have their noses stuck into novels. Could it be that a certain kind of novel is being produced for this very market, just as a certain kind of film is? Are these other readers encountering ...”

“... of the comment on Fielding and Hamidullah in A Passage to India: they regretted the death of Mrs Moore, ‘but they were middle-aged men, who had invested their emotions elsewhere, and outbursts of grief could not be expected from them over a slight acquaintance.’ Furbank, who of course knew the Merz story, deals with it in half a page, but Mrs Beauman, or ...”