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“... to dinner by Charlie Chaplin or Winston Churchill.’ The Turkey Trot is discussed along with Nijinsky and Post-Impressionism: ‘please don’t take an intelligent interest in the subjects of the day,’ the hero begs. In Love at Second Sight he is in khaki, and wounded. At the same time the viewpoint grows, not less intelligent, but more sympathetic to ...”

“... rushing down the hotel corridors with warm towels and hot water. It was Big Serge’s night with Nijinsky!’ She clapped her hands with delight and then turned to Duncan with the air of a naughty child. ‘He’s not too young to ’ear me tell this?’ I answered for him, riveted if not entirely understanding: ‘Please go on.’Lydia and her former stage ...”

“... the collages of Kurt Schwitters, born 1887; in dance, the broken gesture would be the signature of Nijinsky, born 1889; in music, of Stravinsky, born five days before Nescio. Where Wallace Stevens’s devotion to his day job seems touchingly American, the exit Nescio suggests from this broken world is almost stereotypically Dutch. He sees no better solution ...”

“... Holiday and Lenny Bruce. The starry cast of international oddments runs to the likes of Rimbaud, Nijinsky and Modigliani, and as far back as Thomas Chatterton, the Romantic stereotype. As an aid to the study of an important public theme, the list is interesting, but has been assembled, oddly enough, for a much more private reason: namely, as a sort of ...”

“... On the other hand, Ms Edwards has read In the Russian Style by Jacqueline Onassis, and a life of Nijinsky. She reminds me of the kind of clockwork mouse that rushes about on a table and turns automatically when it gets to the edge: it covers every millimetre of its ground, but knows perfectly well that it could not cope with what lies beyond. When she is ...”

“... and at one point, rather absurdly, a stag hunt. Lydia can tell him what Picasso said or what Nijinsky did, but she also has, as the editors put it, ‘a creative taste for ordinary day-to-day living’, so that even a bus-ride or a stomach-ache becomes an absorbing skandal. At the end of the letters there are endearments invented for her ...”

“... renderings, posed and unposed photographs and written descriptions – much the same as that of Nijinsky’s appearances in the same era. But Isadora was a true original, a real prophet, and she had none of Nijinsky’s quality of being a rare flower tended by responsible others; nor did she work in a known tradition that ...”

“... before her American peers were introduced to them at the Armory Show in New York. She saw Nijinsky perform L’Après-midi d’un faune in Paris just days after its premiere. She resolved to design her own ballet, with libretto, for Diaghilev’s troupe. Her Orpheus of the Four Arts was inspired by the wild carnival parades put on by art students in ...”

“... loved watching the dancers ‘leap up like animals’ and regretted that he couldn’t photograph Nijinsky. But he also made the more interesting observation: ‘The orchestra makes a deafening sound that fills me up, like all the great noises I love: aeroplane engines at Issy-les-Moulineaux, racing cars …’ As for ‘leaping like animals’, long before ...”

“... be seen that there is a certain strain on many of Eksteins’s connections: Lindbergh arrives, Nijinsky goes mad, Isadora Duncan breaks her neck, the shocking Josephine Baker came from St Louis, like T.S. Eliot, the man who pronounced printemps to be cruel. The interest is in the detail, not the thesis. A chapter on Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western ...”

“... of Gould is by the psychiatrist Peter Ostwald, the author of interesting psycho-biographies of Nijinsky and Robert Schumann; a good amateur violinist, and a friend of the pianist, Ostwald died of cancer before his book was published, but was apparently able to finish his manuscript despite the travails of his final weeks. Ostwald’s is the first study ...”

“... order to direct a theatre company. Salinger stopped publishing altogether. I also want to know how Nijinsky could have renounced Romantic ballet in favour of ‘primitive’ choreography. Did the skill no longer pose a challenge? Was it too demanding – too difficult – a mistress, either physically or mentally? Did the performers fear, or sense, a kind of ...”

“... phoenix than a delicate hummingbird). Tiny, fast and feather light, with a leap almost as high as Nijinsky’s, at 18 she was the latest sensation of the Ballets Russes. Diaghilev knocked a year off her age and promoted her as a child star. Mackrell is astute about Lopokova’s handling of her early celebrity and her ‘cultural doubleness’. ‘La ...”

“... what enabled him to become one: that his films put him in the small company of those – Byron, Nijinsky, Valentino, the last Prince of Wales – with power over the sexual imaginations of millions. Like an incubus, the Olivier of the Thirties and Forties could enter the dreams of the young, the reveries of the less young, and bring them to orgasm. Had he ...”

“... and John Clare; Sylvia Plath, Laing’s Mary Barnes and Freud’s Dora; Robert Schumann and Vaslav Nijinsky; and poor George III, in his declining years a living facsimile of Lear. There are also other, less familiar figures. There is, for instance, the remarkable Alexander Cruden, the self-styled Alexander the Corrector: expatriate Scotsman, Protestant ...”