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“... her willed vertigo. At the end of the novel, the narrator recalls a conference ‘sponsored by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, at which eight members of the Kennedy Administration gathered at an old resort hotel in the Florida Keys to reassess the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis’. In its own, individual paragraph she gives us the following ...”

“... that moniker suggests (though to be fair he’s mostly unconscious); Patrick Hegarty and his bossy daughter Claire, a keen reader of the Irish Independent; Margaret Rose Sherlock, her Hello! magazine and rosary beads close at hand, visited by everyone except her wayward husband; and Jane Lohan, who has no visitors at all, though she comes from a large ...”

“... generations of indispensable fictional servant girls who precede her. She is a flighty, cheeky, bossy, sexy, ‘slim-legged’ young woman, alternately idle and hard-working, whose sinister powers extend no further than the forefinger with which she threatens to tickle the narrator’s preposterously protean father. We see her ‘warm from sleep and with ...”

“... but a guy liked to have good hair. Then some magic descended on him, and the magician was John Huston, who wrote the script for High Sierra (1941). It’s the story of a veteran gangster, Roy Earle, who wants peace and a new life. But as he comes out of prison, the girl he likes dumps him and he’s on the hook for one more job. Huston saw him ...”

“... detail it’s a feast for anyone hungry for the otherness of the past. The story of noisy, clever, bossy, ambitious Pamela Hansford Johnson – caught, to begin with, in the unselfconscious prose of her adolescent Boots Home diaries, 8” x 5”, a week to a spread – gives us privileged entry into the textures and flavours of a vanished time, the nuances of ...”

“... pitiable condition’, the surgeon Walter Bellew recorded. Nightingale was well-intentioned but bossy and ignorant; the death rate at the hospital was 8 per cent in November 1854 when she arrived, 52 per cent in February 1855. Only later was it discovered that the hospital had been built on a cesspool, and that raw sewage had been leaking into the drinking ...”

“... sin beyond belief’, but wants them greened out of existence (almost literally – like John Hersey’s Hiroshima, Cohn’s island’s vegetation has vivid accesses of post-nuclear lushness). The old Thunderer has turned ecologist and technocrat, and his vendetta against man retains some of that insouciance which impels some deities old and new to ...”

“... called McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon (1943), introduces such characters as Mazie, the ‘bossy, yellow-haired blonde’ who presides over the ticket cage at a Bowery cinema, and the Rev. Mr James Jefferson Davis Hall, ‘the greatest and most frightening street preacher in the city’. There is the founder of Captain Charley’s Private Museum for ...”

“... go like this: it has produced few characters of depth or life (only Mr Biswas, Jean Brodie and John Self in almost forty years); it has been grossly, childishly explicit with symbol and allegory (Golding, Carter); the freedom of its characters has been too often muffled by bossy authorial intrusion ...”

“... thing on occasion, for all its turns and denials. Calling her ‘the leaderene’, as Norman St John-Stevas did, wasn’t candid, or apt, or funny. The old fellows were bound to wish to hit back from time to time at the Handbag, and they did manage to get rid of it, none too soon, in the end.12 April 2013 Servicemen are starting to wonder more and more ...”

“... at all between knowing you want to pee and then just peeing. I was at Plimpton’s funeral in St John the Divine not long ago, and they sat me near the front, you know. Suddenly, I had to go. I knew I wasn’t gonna make it all the way down the aisle so I spotted a little side door and I got the canes and nipped in there. Halfway down the corridor, I was ...”

“... in Anglo-American culture. A canon that includes Pessoa seems infinitely less claustrophobic and bossy. There is, Pessoa writes in The Book of Disquietude, ‘no better étude or melody for me than the lightly moonlit moment in which I don’t know myself as knowable’. Though a source of dismay to him – self-knowledge is, after all, the traditional ...”

“... on them. The waterfront becomes a place of longing, and Mitchell writes of it as hauntingly as John Lee Hooker sang of it. In 1938 Mitchell was hired by Harold Ross as a staff writer for the New Yorker, though his first contribution to the magazine had been published in 1933. He took up with writers like Philip Hamburger, S.J. Perelman and James ...”

“... art is by no means uniform. ‘Tear up and burn as much as possible,’ she said to her husband, John Middleton Murry, who, with his own publishing interests at heart and a sensibility that favoured a wife leaving a certain kind of literary legacy behind her, did nothing of the kind: so her output can sometimes look sketchy or inconsequential, sometimes ...”

“... of my childhood. 10 February. Finish with some regret Frances Spalding’s book on the Pipers, John and Myfanwy, the latter figuring in The Habit of Art where she is to some extent disparaged. I’ve always been in two minds about Piper, liking him when I was young with his paintings ‘modern’ but representational enough to be acceptable, a view I ...”