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“... Sartre was injected with mescaline by his friend Daniel Lagache, a psychiatrist at the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris, Simone de Beauvoir phoned to check in on the first-time tripper. Her call came as a reprieve. As Sartre told her in a scrambled voice, she had interrupted a losing battle against a mass of octopuses. He had been promised a safe ...”

“... is an epic account of the experience of the English Dissenters under the Restoration. Defoe was born on about 30 September 1660, a few streets from where Milton lived in St Giles Cripplegate. In the course of his career, he often quoted Milton, and though he was careful to criticise the Commonwealth and Protectorate – a necessary journalistic strategy ...”

“... a second time, when a woman in the congregation forbade them. The poor girl, whose name was Anne Stevenson, declared that about three years ago she had a child by him, and that he had many times promised her marriage ..., and that he had kept her company so lately as Michaelmas last, and farther that she would be glad to be married to him at any ...”

“... very strong condemnation in Islam) and of lining their own pockets. The US ambassador, Anne Patterson (fresh from a stint in Pakistan), had hoped that Morsi would be an Egyptian Erdoğan, but quite apart from the fact that the model was losing his shine, the history and political dynamics of the two countries are very different. Snubbed by ...”

“... the ocean in their mouth.I am going to glorify the sink with the toothpaste spat in it.Ruefle was born in 1952 and had a peripatetic upbringing as the daughter of a military officer. These days, perhaps unsurprisingly, she prefers to stay home. ‘It is an unspeakable honour to have been invited and an unspeakable honour to be here,’ she said at a literary ...”

“... in their teens, and from the early twenties (Frances Burney and Horace Walpole). Johnson was born in September 1709; the first letter of Volume I is dated 30 October 1731, when Johnson was 22. There must have been some letters by the younger Johnson – to his relation and benefactor Cornelius Ford, for instance – but his youth has gone missing. No ...”

“... returning to America he was dead from a gunshot wound in a Los Angeles hotel room.Milman Parry was born in Oakland, California, on 23 June 1902. His father was variously a prosthetics fitter, a nurse and a pharmacist who devised his own hair tonic and dandruff remedy. When a masked gunman tried to hold up the drugstore where he worked he threw the cash ...”

“... than writing high verse, going back three centuries to observe, and talk with, the colonial poet Anne Bradstreet, for whom, by contrast, the claims of marriage, motherhood and above all Christianity are much more important than those of poetry. Of the poem’s 57 stanzas (based on the stanza Yeats adopted from Abraham Cowley for ‘In Memory of Major Robert ...”

“... Some writers discover their powers gradually. Others – Anne Carson, for example – spring from the head of Zeus. With three books in four years during the mid-1990s, the Canadian poet, classical scholar, essayist and translator became suddenly prominent in North America; she had found readers in Britain as well by 2001, when The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos won the T ...”

“... in Lawrance Thompson’s three-volume biography published between 1966 and 1976. Frost was born in 1874 and died in 1963; between those dates he lived a long and harrowing life, the general details of which have become well known. They include the early death of his editor-father, the family’s return from San Francisco to Massachusetts and New ...”

“... way. Margot Tennant had always possessed the self-confidence and judgmental sweep of someone born to great wealth and social prominence. Her family were pioneers of chemical bleaching. The Tennant plant outside Glasgow was the largest chemical works in the world at the time, and its towering chimney was a famous landmark, known as Tennant’s ...”

“... they are thinking their own thoughts. Cooke isn’t nearly as well known as she should be. She was born in 1927, in Lewisham, where her parents ran a hardware and grocery shop. ‘My mother wouldn’t let me go to school till I was six and a half,’ she once said. ‘She didn’t believe in schools.’ As a child Cooke spent much of her time in the ...”

“... In memoriam Emmanuel Stratas, born Crete 1903, died Toronto 1987 After I’ve lit the fire and looked outside and found us snowbound and the roads all blocked, anxious to prove my memory’s not ossified and the way into that storehouse still unlocked, as it’s easier to remember poetry, I try to remember, but soon find it hard, a speech from Prometheus a boy from Greece BC scratched, to help him learn it, on a shard ...”

“... problem; the word mortgage had a fearsome ring then, which it may have regained today. There was Anne of Green Gables, straight from the orphanage and received coldly because she had red hair and should have been a boy. There was Tom Sawyer, painting the fence for Aunt Polly. Boys did not seem to work quite so hard as girls. Huck Finn, of course, is the ...”

“... beautifully composed and nuanced; as original and haunting as any work by Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter or Virginia Woolf. According to her biographer, Virginia Spencer Carr, McCullers wrote seven drafts of The Member of the Wedding, yet there is nothing artificial or over-polished about its fluid, poetic style or its brilliantly compressed drama. This ...”