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“... men stare: ‘The truth is that the way European women dress is much less servile.’ If being a young woman in postwar America was suffocating, why not try Paris? Alice Kaplan’s Dreaming in French tells the story of three college girls – Jacqueline Bouvier, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis – who did. Kaplan, who wrote about her own year abroad in the ...”

“... Snowdons was ‘like being in the Garden of Eden without seeing God’. Marlon Brando persuaded Kenneth Tynan to ask her to dinner à trois and then was so tongue-tied that he couldn’t address a word to her except through Tynan: ‘Would you ask the princess what she thinks of …’ Tynan himself wanted to postpone his daughter’s birthday party until ...”

“... early, so that by 12.45 I’m back home. It’s a model service, today’s radiographer a bearded young man who asks about Allelujah!, and shows me the screen and how he measures the width of my (quite small) aneurysms. Good young medics always cheer me and offer hope, not for my future but for the world in general.19 ...”

“... Kenneth Branagh​ ’s Belfast is set in the early months of the Troubles, in a mixed working-class district that is cleared of its Catholic residents by a loyalist mob. Paving stones are lifted to barricade the end of the street. Neighbourhood vigilantes are replaced by paramilitaries and the British army. Though the representation of events is spare and often stylised, the film catches the impact of the crisis not just on smashed and burned terraced houses but on the fabric of everyday decency ...”

“... and ‘iconic’ this and ‘optics’ that, had they but known it. All the doomed poets, dying young, or youngish: Rimbaud at 37, Poe at 40, Baudelaire at 46. If Baudelaire has never quite attained the hipster cachet of Rimbaud, it may be purely a matter of image. (Which is itself already quite modern.) Before Keith Richards, before punk, here is rock and ...”

“... critic-in-chief to New York’s avant-garde art scene, had a breakdown after being dumped by the young Helen Frankenthaler. He was referred to Ralph Klein, a therapist who had recently begun working under Pearce and Newton. Greenberg became so attached to Klein that when the therapist left with Pearce and Newton for the summer house they’d built in ...”

“... activity: Nureyev started it, he wrote; he had resisted. Kremke became an alcoholic and died young in mysterious circumstances. Nureyev himself was tailed everywhere he went. On a trip to Deauville he was surprised to receive a phone call from his mother, once more urging his return: ‘They never heard of Deauville.’ Even in Copenhagen he was ...”

“... the war living in Manhattan on not much, and started publishing in magazines. In 1945, with one young child and another on the way, they moved to Vermont so that Stanley could teach at Bennington and the two of them could write. They chose not to live near the campus, but settled in North Bennington instead, where they seem to have been treated with some ...”

“... called Mr Starkie, recognising an unusual capacity in the girl, lent her The Sorrows of Young Werther. She started keeping a diary when she was 12. She collected Classic Comics. The family moved to Southern California, and she grew more desperate to get away. ‘I believe … that the only difference between human beings is intelligence,’ she ...”

“... Even the performers were ready to shove and push to make sure of a good position on the stage: ‘young White, son of the keeper of the county gaol … & a pretty good player … being willing to secure the uppermost place for himself, jostled me against the door at the end of the orchestra where I had but little enjoyment of the concert.’ In his ...”

“... read to him from birth; but they only really sounded like Thomas. And, unusually for an ambitious young poet of the time, Thomas was not trying too hard to be original: there just seemed to be something he could do with words that no one else could do. He was, in that sense, tailor-made for the romantic myth of the poet as self-fashioned ...”

“... with what has been logged as ‘the most complained about event in the history of the BBC’: not Kenneth Tynan saying ‘fuck’ on air, or a programme giving equal time to an alleged IRA commander and a loyalist hardliner, or even the proposal to alter the timing of the shipping forecast, but the blanket coverage given to the death of Prince Philip in ...”

“... He had mined the archive for The James Family and for his long-authoritative edition (with Kenneth Murdock) of The Notebooks of Henry James, which came out in the same year; together with Henry James: The Major Phase (1944), these made him the central force in the field. With his going, there was only Leon Edel (who in due course encouraged his ...”

“... And a clutch of recent biographies has toppled several notable royal icons from their pedestals. Kenneth Rose depicted George V as an ogre so boorish and philistine that in retrospect he appears almost pathetically comical. In his books on Edward VIII, Michael Bloch has washed a great deal of the Abdication dirty linen in public, and much of the mud has ...”

“... was well represented by writers who weren’t New York intellectuals at all. We could think of Kenneth Burke, R.P. Blackmur, Allen Tate, many more. But Mrs Trilling’s point is important. What hides in the phrase ‘general culture’ is the belief that literature and culture and politics are connected, that controversy is good and bad for the mind and ...”