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“... did not draw on classical literature. Women could be ‘lovers of their own sex’ or, in the more frank Greek loan word, ‘tribades’ (literally ‘rubbers’; the words ‘rubster’ and ‘fricatrice’ were also used in the 17th century). The OED cites no usage of ‘lesbianism’ in the modern sense before 1870, when it was used to argue that ...”

“... made me a suit last year. My first suit and probably my last. 3 March. Lunch at L’Etoile with Michael Palin and Barry Cryer, Elena Salvoni still presiding there at lunchtime and though she’s 90 not looking much different from when I first got to know her at Bianchi’s in the 1960s. Barry as usual fires off the jokes which are almost his trademark but ...”

“... were the only reality – not that one could believe them either. 16 January. Listening to Michael Heseltine justifying the £ 475,000 of Mr Brown, the chairman of British Gas, I remember Joe Fitton. During the war Dad was a warden in the ARP, his companion on patrol a neighbour, Joe Fitton. Somebody aroused Joe’s ire (a persistent failure to draw ...”

“... of human activity and contact, silting up in vast unchartable archives. In Repeated Takes, Michael Chanan has written a concise history of the technology that has wrought this change and the commercial and creative forces that have shaped it. His account is elegant and impressively well-informed. He ranges across the entire technical field, from ...”

“... in a mental asylum in Ithaca, New York; and Max Ferber, a fictional character based on the painter Frank Auerbach, who left his parents behind in Germany in 1939, when he escaped for England.When The Emigrants appeared in Michael Hulse’s English translation, in 1996, it was often described as a book about four victims of ...”

“... Dáil Éireann was proscribed in September 1919. In the subsequent guerrilla warfare of 1919-21 Michael Collins, the Minister for Finance and Director of Intelligence of the Volunteers or Irish Republican Army, rose to prominence. In 1920 Britain established Home Rule states – one substantive, comprising the six Unionist-majority north-eastern ...”

“... Farson, in The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (also 1993), gives it a passing reference. Michael Peppiatt, in Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (2008), gives the year of Bacon’s departure for the cottage as 1942, adding: ‘The enforced idleness, free of wartime anxieties and the distractions of London, served as a catalyst to his real ...”

“... of Mr Dewey’s philosophy are the deficiencies of the American scene itself.’ Waldo Frank, writing in 1929, said that ‘it is just to liken John Dewey to a child.’ Entering his ninth decade as World War Two began, Dewey was constantly told that, since he did not share the grown-ups’ belief in ‘objective moral truth’, he could not answer ...”

“... R. Guggenheim Museum of Non-Objective Art) opened in 1939 and was given new prominence in 1959 by Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous building. Then came the Hirshhorn in Washington DC in 1974. Across the Mall, the National Gallery of Art was watching and I.M. Pei was commissioned to create the East Building, which opened in 1978. The East Building was not at ...”

“... is concerned? During the 1980s, a generation of American scholars – Ron Bush, Reed Dasenbrock, Michael Groden, James Longenbach, Lawrence Rainey – set those limits by mapping in great detail the relations between the various literary Modernists and examining the genesis of their major writings. Mutual influence is by no means the sole topic of such ...”

“... vignettes like Chatwin’s, humorous and on occasion startling. The best of them are memorable. Michael Ignatieff watches Chatwin ‘like an old baboon’ under a mulberry tree in the south of France, having his hair combed by his wife. The ravenous Francis Wyndham and James Fox spoon up a pitifully notional soufflé made from wild strawberries which they ...”

“... example, a not generously staffed and already busy Book Marketing Council, seem insurmountable. Frank Delaney’s notion of a fortnight’s festival in London in the autumn, tied to a BBC 2 book festival, similarly needs to be extended nationally, and so does the newly conceived Edinburgh Book Bonanza, which ran during its Festival. Perhaps the closest ...”

“... the full picture as he liked to see it. His account is inevitably selective but also surprisingly frank, especially about his own failings. And he is generous, in retrospect, about his various lovers. His passionate relationship with West, for example, descended into fractious bickering long before she finally ended things between them in 1923, and Wells ...”

“... and artists – tracing a line from Rimbaud through Futurism to Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein, Frank O’Hara, John Cage and beyond – who have advanced what she sees as modernist goals: above all, the up-to-date, sceptical investigation of the materials and ideas from which a work of art gets made. Though much of Perloff’s writing concerns the great ...”

“... contained. It included such early classics as R.S.R. Fitter on the natural history of London, and Frank Fraser Darling on the Scottish Highlands. Rackham has all their verve and learning, the same immediacy in the telling, but an even greater wish to involve the reader in a problem and its solving. It is, he says, a book more about questions than answers. It ...”