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“... by the grim discovery of mass grave sites at Dozier School for Boys: it tells the story of Elwood Curtis, a talented 16-year-old acolyte of Martin Luther King Jr, who has hope and promise snatched away by the torturous racial violence to which he’s subjected at a reform school in Florida in the early 1960s.Assured of another bestseller, Whitehead turned ...”

“... I know nothing about), we sold out to a property millionaire and I accepted an offer to join Curtis Brown, the agents. Small publishing is a risky undertaking at best. I remember John Lehmann’s warning: ‘You sit there listening to the rats under the floorboards.’ As a sailor, I would prefer to say that storm cones were for ever up. But we had our ...”

“... James Hepburn opens his history of literary agency – The Author’s Empty Purse, published in l968 – with the same quotation that Graham Watson uses to conclude his reminiscences of a lifetime spent in the profession: This is the age of the middleman. He is generally a parasite. He always flourishes. I have been forced to give him some little attention lately in my particular business ...”

“... the nicest possible way, she dumped him; he is still an invalid today. Kissing Marilyn, said Tony Curtis, was like kissing Hitler. As Sammy Davis Jr put it: ‘She hangs like a bat in the minds of the men that knew her.’ Or like a dove. The other portrait Miller drew of his bride was Roslyn in The Misfits, driven by her animal recoil from any form of ...”

“... to despise,’ she wrote. All her musical ambition had been directed at winning a place at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, a destination which seemed so inevitable her family moved north to be with her. But, at the age of 17, Simone was rejected by Curtis (two days before she died, they awarded her an honorary ...”

“... with his circle of intimates – Walter Berry, Paul Bourget, Abbé Mugnier, Ralph and Lisa Curtis, Madame de Cossé-Brissac, Rosa Fitz-James (“the best hostess I have ever known”), and Philomène de Lévis-Mirepoix – all members of the fashionable upper crust of cosmopolitan Paris.’ Was there no one among all ...”

“... film ends. One of the many attractions of LA Confidential, a glossy, atmospheric movie based on a James Ellroy novel, is its unembarrassed pleasure in this kind of stuff. You get the world but you lose the girl. The girl is damaged goods, but she is Kim Basinger. The other figure in the triangle, played by Russell Crowe, is another policeman, an ex-thug who ...”

“... read about game theory and evolution, about genetics and fluid dynamics. I read about Jesse James, Bonnie and Clyde, Joseph McCarthy. I read the service manual for my parents’ ’63 Saab …’ And so on. And yet, a few years ago, Everett suddenly found himself writing ‘black’ novels – or, at least, novels about black novels. Erasure (2001) was ...”

“... notion of ‘correctability’, a term I first heard [used] in the sense I am using it here by Amy Curtis-Weber in a feminist theory class at Brandeis University. As I understood it then, and as I am using it now, correctability allows one to speak, to speculate, to try to formulate ideas about experiences and communities that are somehow ‘other’ in the ...”

“... such as the Woodworth-Mathews Personal Data Sheet and the Pressey Test of the Emotions. In 1924, Curtis Merriman and Hermann Siemens explored the idea of comparing pairs of identical (monozygotic) twins with fraternal (dizygotic) twins, as a means of further clarifying the effects of heritability. In 1937, Horatio Newman, Frank Freeman and Karl Holzinger ...”

“... nature of Leicester’s job, all agree at least in conferring on him a particular job title, which Curtis Perry’s able new book sets out to unpack. They refer to him simply as ‘the favourite’. It is one of the paradoxes of the English Renaissance that this golden age of English favouritism, which saw the likes of Leicester, Essex, Somerset and Buckingham ...”

“... make him into a person. Before, anybody could have played his part.’ It is often said that Jimmy James became the best stage drunk ever seen in British variety by recognising that drunks don’t act drunk: that a defining characteristic of drunkenness is the strained, and therefore inadvertently funny, attempt to appear sober. Morecambe understood the ...”

“... as being at once too ‘plotless’ (or, as Washington Irving put it – before Cooper, Hawthorne, James and others – too lacking in ‘association’) and ‘stiflingly, even obsessively over-plotted’. There is a relationship, in Fender’s reading of American literature, between plotting and landscape which can be ...”

“... and parents, or one’s own youth – unfamiliar, revealing its full complexity and difference. James Nott’s parents also met at a dance, but his book impressively resituates their story in that strange and vanished world which, for three generations of young Britons, revolved around the dance hall. Never before the period 1918-60, Nott writes, had ‘so ...”

“... a lifetime of being told she was headed for Carnegie Hall, she failed the entrance exam for the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, her life collapsed. In her autobiography and in many interviews Simone blames her rejection on racism. She didn’t get in, she was sure, because she was black, not because she wasn’t the best. Who knows, the paperwork has ...”