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“... with HMQ still at it, and the policemen in the forecourt very jolly and eating ice cream.1 June. John Horder dies at 92, who, after a succession of bad doctors at university and in New York, was the physician who restored my faith in the medical profession. It was partly because he listened, as doctors have learned to do since, I hope, but which in the early ...”

“... This​ book is a departure from John Carey’s normal mode, much more intently introductory than anything else he has written in a long and distinguished career. A Little History of Poetry canters from Gilgamesh and Homer to Mary Oliver and Les Murray in three hundred pages with a breezy sense of mission, assuming in the reader no previous acquaintance with the subject (‘Confessional poetry is poetry that reveals personal confidences, especially relating to mental illness and hospitalisation’) or indeed with other sorts of knowledge that might be thought fairly general (‘Totalitarian regimes seek to control every aspect of life, including writing ...”

“... important people, among them Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon, as well as Douglas Cooper … I got to know Francis when he designed some furniture for my Eccleston Street flat. I like to remember his beautiful pansy-shaped face, sometimes with too much lipstick on it … In those days Francis was living at the end of Ebury Street … He had an ...”

“... as evoked by the English Romantics and ‘solitude’ as evoked by, say, Fenimore Cooper. (Compare the word as it is used in the Prelude and in The Deerslayer.) But whether Lawson-Peebles is right to claim that Lewis was finally broken by his inability to describe the new in old terms – i.e. that his failure to publish his journal and his ...”

“... seriousness. He was tolerant of the agnosticism of his female friends, such as Ann Fleming, Diana Cooper and Nancy Mitford. But he became obsessed by trying to convert John Betjeman to his own faith, and bombarded the poet with furious injunctions to submit. ‘If you try to base your life and hopes on logical absurdities ...”

“... Yet, to my knowledge, the only critic who ever tackled the subject head on is the writer Carol Cooper, an African American woman who had also worked in the music industry. In an astute piece for the Face in June 1983 (it includes a wholly imaginary Q&A with Prince which was still being quoted as fact thirty years later, so acute was her ...”

“... Fritz Lang’s Cloak and Dagger and lingered in Hollywood as a screenwriter, socialising with Gary Cooper and Ava Gardner. This sybaritic idyll ended with the expiration of his studio contract, and he returned to New York divorced, unemployed and broke. Then came the call from Wisner.Wisner had left the law to become deputy assistant secretary of state for ...”

“... on her work as worthy of parody – not just recognisable, but recognised. When Thomas Hardy, John Masefield and Walter de la Mare secured her a civil list pension in 1923, Mew couldn’t decide whether it was more ‘like a dream or a nightmare’. Such diffidence also contained defiance. Her public readings were bracing affairs – ‘like having ...”

“... took voice lessons, ‘its calculated changes in pitch sounded like a car changing gear.’ Duff Cooper called him an ‘adulterous, canting, slobbering Bolshie’. When Mosley switched over to Labour in 1924, his new colleagues were equally suspicious of him. Ernest Bevin thought him ‘the kind of unreliable intellectual who might at any moment stab me in ...”

“... the Pall Mall Gazette, had liaisons with Violet Manners, later duchess of Rutland – Lady Diana Cooper was the result – as well as with George’s sister Pamela, who protested to alarmed family members that ‘he says “How do you do” as if it was “you are the Soul of my life,” but he is unaware of this, I really believe like people who clear their ...”

“... a grounded reality but merely to itself; it is not a story so much as a game played with a story. John Bayley, in his perceptive book Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary, has faulted Shklovsky’s formalism, arguing that as with Tolstoy’s or Shakespeare’s characters, we are encouraged by artifice to think of Onegin and Tatiana as real people with real ...”

“... American novel’s evasion, as Fiedler saw it, of the reality of mature sexual love, from Fenimore Cooper down to Faulkner and Hemingway. In a sense, there would have been no need. Asked by an interviewer from the Paris Review about his early influences, Rush first mentioned ‘D.H. Lawrence. Actually, a lot of Lawrence.’ He has probably been familiar for ...”

“... who look at life through the telescopic lens of a rifle, and that was the model for him, much as John Wayne was once a model for boys who thought cowboys put decency back into the world. On 20 July 2012, James Holmes, after dyeing his hair a kind of purple, went to a midnight screening of the Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises at the Century movie theatre in ...”

“... what was McKellen like? Come on, guys.) Soon, he is describing another night out, with Lady Diana Cooper, Andy Warhol and Bianca Jagger. (‘And so I became friends with Bianca Jagger. She was beautiful. She’d just cut her hair short and was wearing a green Halston trouser suit.’) Next on the list are Bob Geldof and Paula Yates: According to Alan ...”

“... Thomas’s death the family fractured. Frances ran away, abandoning the children to her parents, John and Alice Jennings. When she reappeared two months later it was to take over the lease on the Moorfields stables and transfer it to her new young husband, William Rawlings. Her parents watched as she drove their once prosperous business into the ...”