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“... biographies of Rosenberg were published and in 2003 two of those biographers – Jean Moorcroft Wilson and Jean Liddiard – produced selections from his work, the latter also containing a substantial selection of Rosenberg’s letters. With Rosenberg it has been feast or fast. Vivien Noakes’s variorum edition of the poems and plays is the first scholarly ...”

“... of Spokane, one-time Lilac Princess at school, millionaire biographer of Jacqueline Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra, looks not all that different from her current subject. There is the same bright, taut face which a good surgical lift always ensures, the same immaculately-dyed and coiffeured hair, the same fixed smile exhibiting the kind of ...”

“... by an outside observer, not all their details are of the pinafore-and-button-boot variety. Annie Wilson, ninth child of Enoch and Elizabeth (‘Father should have more consideration,’ her sisters used to grumble), tells of bread from the Board of Guardians and second-hand shoes, of guiding her father’s hand to sign a ...”

“... novel, and is familiar from the work of other black writers of that period, such as Harriet Wilson, the author of Our Nig. In the sections which describe her life at the White House the stance changes to that of a discreet observer, but even there occasional touches of gentle melodrama still remain. The three chapters (there are 15 in all) devoted to ...”

“... In her lifetime she was praised by H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Louise Bogan, but Edmund Wilson said that One of Ours,* her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was a complete failure and that My Antonia ended on the level of a Ladies Home Journal serial. Lionel Trilling called The Professor’s House ‘lame’ and Ernest Hemingway thought Cather had found ...”

“... In England, Indian food was thought to be anything sprinkled with curry powder: a substance Elizabeth David described as ‘unlikeable, harshly flavoured, and possessed of an aroma clinging and as all-pervading in its way as that of English boiled cabbage or cauliflower’. ‘To me the word “curry” is as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the ...”

“... forgets. A second never knows.’ Supposedly, we only learned how to eat well as a nation when Elizabeth David travelled to the Mediterranean and brought back news of olives, apricots and taramasalata. (Mediterranean Food was published in 1950.) But Meades recalls how his own mother’s cooking changed in the late 1950s, and not necessarily for the ...”

“... Jane Jewsbury said. The type of femininity she displays in her writing is a moot point, however. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote: ‘I admire her genius – love her memory – respect her piety and high moral tone. But she does always seem to me a lady rather than a woman.’ Measuring Hemans’s contribution to letters seems to be inseparable from ‘the ...”

“... from the trade of archer. In January 1960 Evelyn Waugh declared that he and Betjeman, along with Elizabeth Bowen and L.P. Hartley, had lost their edge as writers. In these often maudlin years, Betjeman’s openness is a great asset to his biographer just as it was a considerable source of material to the poet. The flyleaf of the Collected Poems (1958) states ...”

“... 1999 things sped up. Peter Conradi’s portly authorised biography was smartly challenged by A.N. Wilson’s slimmer unauthorised memoir, Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her, a witty, affectionate, impious account which made disturbing suggestions about Bayley’s feelings towards his wife. There was also Iris, a film with Kate Winslet and Judi Dench as younger and ...”

“... for this sort of reason that Brightman decides not to take sides when the next marriage, to Edmund Wilson, erupts into such violence: she’s pretty sure that McCarthy harboured a hysterical, vengeful monster which got out and raved long before Wilson co-operated with her darker self by drunkenly attacking her and driving ...”

“... agents at witchcraft trials, burnt alongside Protestants by Mary Tudor and alongside Catholics by Elizabeth I, roasted at country fairs and persecuted for sport, cats were often given short shrift in Britain. Ancient symbols of fertility, they were commonly deemed lascivious (the female cat was especially lecherous), but feline stand-offishness was the real ...”

“... To look again at The Shores of Light, Edmund Wilson’s collection of his reviews in the Twenties and Thirties, is to marvel at his ability to discern, analyse and assess the American talents of the period as soon as they poked nose above ground. Hemingway was spotted with the first publication of In our time in 1924 (the edition 170 copies) as a writer of distinctive prose which had ‘more artistic integrity’ than anything else written about World War One by an American ...”

“... properties to trivial springs. Nevertheless, Roman Catholics clung to their saintly lore and Queen Elizabeth suspected that they hung about such springs as Holywell, in Flintshire, plotting her downfall. The richer Catholics sought to travel to Continental spas, where dubious contracts abounded, and this traffic had to be regulated by a system of ...”

“... film based on the notion that Shakespeare was really the Earl of Oxford, Joely plays the young Elizabeth I and Vanessa plays the old version. Later this year, Joely’s 21-year-old daughter Daisy Bevan will appear in her first feature film, The Two Faces of January, adapted from Patricia Highsmith. (The casting director has claimed to have been unaware of ...”