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“... which this competition differs from a golf tournament is that nobody gets appearance money. It’s all or nothing, an award for literary merit is made to look as much like a win on the pools as possible. By now the world as well as the contenders knows who’s in, who’s out, the matter ...”

“... Avenue, new books in French at the Librairie de France or Rizzoli, and old books in German at Mary S. Rosenberg’s austere, packed shop on Broadway, where neither I nor another obsessive friend could afford $100 for a first edition of Winckelmann’s history of ancient art. You could ...”

“... from the early 1960s. ‘As “The Secret History of the Player Piano”, it pursues America’s growth in terms of the evolution of the programming and organisational aspects of mechanisation in industry and science, education, crime, sociology and leisure and the arts, between 1876 and 1929.’ In fact there was too much here, and the project got away ...”

“... follow not what actually happened, but what ought to have done. Surely (in Ragtime) John Pierpont Morgan might have invited Henry Ford to lunch to talk about reincarnation; and why wouldn’t the anarchist Emma Goldman have given a full-body massage to the society divorcée Evelyn Nesbit (accompanied by a lecture on sexual politics)? These lines of life have ...”

“... The trailer for the recent BBC dramatisation of Byron’s life made no bones about the poet’s appeal. ‘Everything you’ve ever heard about him is true,’ the husky female voice-over promised. Here was a story that would excite us because of what we already thought we knew ...”

“... disillusioned. The Rev. Thomas Noel had been promised some ‘substantial’ token of the groom’s appreciation. He received instead one of the rings of which Byron kept a plentiful supply to distribute to admirers. Noel was used to disappointment. An illegitimate cousin of Annabella, he knew full well that the vast fortune of his father, Viscount ...”

“... given access to the Chartwell Papers: his book was not to be published until the last of Gilbert’s volumes had appeared. Biographical work projected on such a scale is unlikely to be completed quite as planned. Randolph’s scheme had been to publish a volume each year. His successor increased the main volumes to ...”

“... Ernest Hemingway. Meryle Secrest discloses that Hemingway was desperate in his suit for Berenson’s favours, and would have prostrated himself for a petal from the Great Man’s boutonnière. He clambered out of plane wrecks and gutted hotels, eager to make the pilgrimage to Settignano, If only the manicured finger would ...”

“... convincingly bizarre place names, seemed much like my grandparents’ North Yorkshire only more so, being about 110 per cent Methodist. Scotland was unlike Cornwall and Wales in having fewer chapels and bigger mountains, but the ‘Welcome to Scotland’ signs you drove past at the border didn’t seem different in kind from the familiar and palpably ...”

“... Cartoonists​ find it as easy to draw puritans as they do Vikings. There’s an example on my pinboard. A behatted man, buttoned up in black, admires his wife’s sampler, which reads: ‘Way to Go, God.’ ‘Nice sentiment, Martha,’ he beams. Martha wears the same gloomy sub fusc, with black bonnet and broad linen collar ...”

“... girdles, and items used in secretarial work, too. The epithet – coined by the feminist Robin Morgan as a counterpart for ‘draft-card burner’ – shows how deeply the women’s movement both was and was perceived to be about female sexuality. What was it? Who would define it, shape it, control it? Who were ...”

“... Adrienne Rich’s​ poems speak so strongly to the current zeitgeist (dating from, say, the Occupy movement through #MeToo to Black Lives Matter) that it’s astounding – no, instructive – to realise they were written twenty, forty, fifty years ago:at your tabletelephone ringsevery four minutestalkof terrible thingsthe papers bringingno good news                                (‘New York’)False history gets made all day, any day,the truth of the new is never on the news                                (‘Turning the Wheel’)There is a cop who is both prowler and father …You have to confessto him, you are guilty of the crimeof having been forced                                (‘Rape’)Suppose you want to writeof a woman braidinganother woman’s hair –straight down, or with beads and shellsin three-strand plaits or corn-rows –you had better know the thicknessthe length the patternwhy she decides to braid her hairhow it is done to herwhat country it happens inwhat else happens in that country                                (‘North American Time’)Her essays employ an argot that contemporary opinion pieces might have cribbed from: ‘The creative energy of patriarchy is fast running out; what remains is its self-generating energy for destruction ...”

“... the ears of E.S. Turner, and on from there to some Spain or America. He isn’t bothered. He’s nearly ninety. He’s thinking of things to say about his life. And when he speaks he speaks in a small way. His voice seems aware of the danger it’s in. ‘Mmm,’ he says. ‘My first ...”

“... seem likely that this autumn we will be shooting The Lady in the Van. This is the story of Miss Mary Shepherd, the elderly eccentric who took up residence in my garden in 1974, living there in a van until her death 15 years later. Maggie Smith played Miss Shepherd on the stage in 1999 and all being well will star in the film with Nicholas Hytner ...”

“... the Modernist technical devices available to him, but mainly stream of consciousness.’ Broch’s work has often attracted comments like that and they sound, to the general reader, like the kiss of death. Nevertheless, The Spell is as straightforwardly readable – and haunting – as the stories of Walter De La Mare, say, or as Emily Brontë. Secondly, it ...”