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“... of a malign homophobic campaign that was already in progress in 1939, when Auden and Isherwood and Pears and Britten fled to America to escape it. This claim may not be quite groundless but it probably underestimates the complexity of the emigrants’ motives. And perhaps, as Morley believes, the police and the judiciary had been gradually getting tougher on ...”

“... answer to that question from an economic history is, in the old Spanish phrase, to expect pears from the elm. His book offers a competent account of Argentine economic history, though not one as readable or as stimulating as Professor Ferns’s short economic history published a decade ago. I am less sure, however, that even in the field of economics ...”

“... D’Annunzio. At 5 a.m. they share a breakfast that includes avocados, which they called alligator pears.’ Men who imitated Valentino’s trademark patent-leather hair were nicknamed ‘Vaselinos’, at once a racial slur and a reference to a personal lubricant once popular among homosexuals. Metonymically adjacent to ‘Vaselino’ is ‘dandy’, which ...”

“... 11 January. It’s not to disparage David Bowie, but if even a fraction of the tributes being paid to him and his influence were true we would never have had a Conservative government or indeed any government at all. Hearing the news on the Today programme this morning R. nearly cries. I met Bowie only once, at John Schlesinger’s sometime in the 1980s, and remember him as a slight, almost colourless figure, who was somehow Scots ...”

“... gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster Wallace (b.1962), the previous generation’s experimentalism was as much a way of looking at society as a renovation of novelistic technique. Writers their grouchier teachers viewed as rebarbatively modish or futuristic struck them as fairly ...”

“... Leishman rendered many of the odes into graceful Alcaics and Asclepiads; Christopher Middleton and David Constantine, in contrast, resorted to looser paraphrases. Hamburger takes the more challenging route – with considerable success. The opening lines of ‘Bread and Wine’ catch the rhythm and flow of Hölderlin’s distichs: Round us the town is at ...”

“... Europe, would come to the Zam Zam, sometimes for the martinis but usually to be thrown out. When David Letterman came to town to do a week of shows his advance people phoned Bruno to see if he would throw Letterman out of the bar on the show. ‘No, I’m sorry, thank you,’ Bruno said over the phone. ‘Who’s ...”

“... from here on the would-be historical regulator encounters difficulties, mainly of the apples and pears variety. At root there is a problem of vocabulary, and this underlies a variety of statuses and relationships which may defy regulation. In Spanish, they spoke of the privado or valido. Yet Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares, who, if anyone, makes ...”

“... where, among others regularly passing the (obligatory) potatoes, were Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Carson McCullers, Lincoln Kirstein and Gipsy Rose Lee. When love comes to the confirmed bachelor old friends find it difficult to take. Chums winced to see T.S. Eliot spooning with wife No 2, smirked when they brazenly held hands, and there was a bit of ...”

“... Swing Tenor – after his disastrous nervous breakdown in the US Army in the 1940s. According to David Perry in Jazz Greats (1996), Many claims, some of them vague and inflated, have been made about the linguistic originality of black American English, but in the case of Lester Young’s language, such claims seem to have some substance. Buck Clayton ...”