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“... and instantly recognisable, figure of ‘Homer Simpsoane’, who (obviously having read Darley’s frank biography) has no trouble at all in identifying this obsessive and sadistic father as ‘the first Dysfunctionalist’. The 20th-century enthusiasm for Soane’s work might seem to be just another strand in the traditional tale of architectural revaluation ...”

“... yourself and yet do not sound conceited’. In 1960, after reading some deeply personal poems by Anne Sexton (which were often compared to Lowell’s), she wrote to Lowell: ‘there is all the difference in the world, I’m afraid, between her kind of simplicity and that of Life Studies, her kind of egocentricity that is simply that, and yours that has been ...”

“... in case de Staël’s vengeance should light on them. Meanwhile, he appealed to his generous aunt, Anne de Nassau, to write to de Staël, begging her to give him his freedom. ‘He has been weak enough to put up with that servitude out of consideration for the pain you claim to be suffering and your histrionic grief,’ Madame de Nassau wrote. It was a good ...”

“... in the East began at 25, when she spent six months at the Embassy in Tehran with her uncle, Sir Frank Lascelles. The book she wrote describing her experiences, Safar Nameh, or Persian Pictures, is vivid and colourful, with a sharp eye for detail – not unlike many of Freya Stark’s early sketches. But she was also a scholar, and went on to produce a ...”

“... Anthology had seen off the rival Oxford Anthology, produced by heavyweight academics including Frank Kermode and Harold Bloom, and the deep histories of English and British culture were being re-scripted. A revised edition of the Norton Anthology commissioned a translation of Beowulf from Heaney, and David Damrosch’s Longman Anthology of British ...”

“... would be wielded in giving a description and character summary. For example, the first time Anne Hollander was mentioned, I asked who she was. Karl didn’t say: ‘She’s a distinguished historian of fashion.’ He said: ‘She’s a tremendous pedant and aesthete of the knicker.’ This was delivered as: ‘She’s a [level-one italics] tremendous ...”

“... than minor poets, he was, as often, lending his authority to a truism. Only once or twice, as with Anne Sexton, does Vendler haplessly show that a poet’s ‘whole’ reputation rests on next to nothing. Usually, as with Plath, she prints enough of what matters to configure a sensibility and vindicate her choice. Best of all, she gives us 16 pages of Charles ...”

“... sex lives is jaw-dropping. In 1956, he went to Holkham Hall in Norfolk for the wedding of Lady Anne Coke to Colin Tennant, later Lord Glenconner. In her recent memoir, Lady in Waiting, Anne Glenconner describes her husband’s sexual proclivities, but also says that in those days girls of her class couldn’t possibly ...”

“... reinforces this quality, seeming to echo the ‘lovely’ but ‘unyielding’ sentences that Anne Enright describes in the volume’s introduction. It’s difficult to look at Brennan here and not think of the words she puts in a missionary’s mouth in ‘Stories of Africa’: ‘You could say that an exile was a person who knew of a country that made ...”

“... of his life. 21 April. Persisting with the Duff Cooper diaries, which, though they’re more than frank about his innumerable liaisons, are utterly silent on more interesting topics, the cruise of the Nahlin, for instance, in 1936 when Duff Cooper and his wife accompanied the King and Mrs Simpson around the Mediterranean. Years ago Russell Harty had supper ...”

“... and gold. When John Singer Sargent’s tremendous portrait of the colonial administrator Sir Frank Swettenham inspired Rebecca West to comment that ‘he looked as if he wasn’t quite a gentleman,’ was she showing her sensitivity to the excess of his display? To the unfurling, regal drapery behind him (from his collection of Malayan fabrics), to the ...”

“... have omitted much that is interesting and revealing, but the omission of Bishop’s letters to Anne Stevenson, who wrote the first book about her work, seems odd. These letters, packed with insight and wonderful phrases, are quoted in Brett Millier’s biography, in David Kalstone’s Becoming a Poet and in Lorrie Goldensohn’s Elizabeth Bishop: The ...”

“... the start of the 2007 season. Eleven pitches, trampled by hard-swearing enthusiasts, were lost. Anne Woollett of the Hackney Marshes User Group complained that the Olympic Development Authority (ODA) had sequestered portions of East Marsh, a year ahead of their promise, to construct ‘a huge 12-lane motorway’. The ODA admitted that two trenches had ...”

“... considerable comic pains to prevent it. Mistress Page wants the Frenchman to marry her daughter, Anne, and although her husband, George, would prefer the upper-class twit Slender as a son-in-law, and Caius has a second rival in the person of the broke but ultimately successful courtier Fenton, no one expresses any serious Francophobia or asks whether the ...”

“... constant discussion and enquiry and it was a topic on which, while not boastful, Dudley was always frank, informative and very funny. That Dudley, given the chance, could talk illuminatingly about music was brought home to me in almost the only conversation I had with him about jazz, when he explained the difference, as he saw it, between a good and an average ...”