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“... inhabited by the Hollywood shrink and in the fictional characters of American writers from Scott Fitzgerald to Erica Jong. It is an image manifestly different from the one with which the millions of British television viewers, glued weekly to the soap-operatic events taking place in Maybury Hospital, were presented in the person of Dr ...”

“... including my parents, held in the archives of University College Dublin. My father, Desmond FitzGerald, was Director, later Minister for Publicity, for most of the period and during the last few months of 1922 was minister in charge of the combined Foreign Affairs and Publicity Departments, under the new description ‘External Affairs’. The Irish ...”

“... erratic, often inebriated behaviour of Carson McCullers, a literary prodigy to set beside Scott Fitzgerald in the previous generation. (McCullers, married to a bisexual man, was frequently enamoured of women who sometimes, but more often didn’t, welcome her effusive advances.) Of the trio, Flannery O’Connor, who published her first novel Wise Blood in ...”

“... island as still subject to imperial constraints. In his introduction to the Field Day pamphlets by Edward Said, Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson, he says: ‘Field Day’s analysis of the situation derives from the conviction that it is, above all, a colonial crisis.’ (Note that the conviction does not derive from the analysis.) Theory helps Deane to ...”

“... Arthur Benson​ never stopped dreaming about his father. Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, dropped dead saying the Confession in 1896 – he sank onto his prayer cushion and didn’t get up again – but nearly twenty years later his son found him crouched in the cupboard under the stairs, dressed in his purple cassock and playing with some toys: ‘Papa … giggled; then he said: “But now that you have found me out, you must run down here as often as you can, and we will have a good game at something – You don’t know what fun it is ...”

“... Anderson, who influenced his style and sent him to Paris with a pocketful of introductions. Or Fitzgerald, who would get it in the neck in A Moveable Feast for being worried about the size of his cock. Or Faulkner, who would be castigated in Death in the Afternoon for writing too much and being unedited. Joseph Fruscione’s Faulkner and ...”

“... pitching it a bit strong. Certainly Chenoune has read his Chateaubriand and his Proust, his Scott Fitzgerald and his Ernest Hemingway, as well as the Tailor and Cutter and Journal des Tailleurs; he has studied a history of the Hawaiian shirt and he knows where to put his hand on the fanzine called Sniffin’ Glue. His objective approach is praised in a ...”

“... this continent.’ I knew that this had still been possible long after the landfall mentioned by Fitzgerald when a priest on Cape Breton Island told me about the arrival of his great-great-grandfather Beaton and his family early in the 19th century. They had rowed in a dory from Prince Edward Island with all their ...”

“... meant ‘going back to origins’, not warbling your native woodnotes wild. It was only with Edward Young’s 18th-century Conjectures on Original Composition that the emphasis on novelty became linked, in a way many moderns find axiomatic, with a creativity that supposedly owed little to imitation and the great models of the past. But canon formation as ...”

“... to the desired and perfect type? I saw the Birmingham exhibition just after reading Penelope Fitzgerald’s Edward Burne-Jones, a wonderfully good biography. Burne-Jones’s relationships with the young women who appear in the paintings in various mythical guises, with his clients (he didn’t need very many but they ...”

“... his own sort of creature: giant silken pussy-cat or, as he once described himself to Edward Carpenter, ‘an old hen ... with something in my nature furtive’. Gosse and Carpenter were of course all eager to know what was really going on. But Whitman was less furtive than serene: like any other big animal, he simply had his own complete ...”

“... men and violet evenings; and there’s a touch of Sheila Graham in the Garden of Allah, with Fitzgerald drunk on the floor. Kenneth Anger is deep in conversation with Nathanael West at the counter of Schwab’s drugstore, Joan Didion’s desert air is wafting in under the door, and Ben Hecht is taking notes. Stein has an ear for Americana at its most ...”

“... the Scottish novelist. Mrs Oliphant was famous for her productivity. She published biographies of Edward Irving and the Comte de Montalembert, a literary history of England and more than sixty fat novels.* From the mid-1850s until her death in 1897 she contributed half a dozen essays a year to Blackwood’s Magazine, delivering on Bunsen, Savonarola, Queen ...”

“... one, wrong blond(e)s after all having some tradition in literature: Lord Alfred Douglas, Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe, to name but three who were all wrong, all right. This account of the relationship between Auden and Kallman is written by the blond’s late-in-the-day stepmother, Dorothy J. Farnan, also blonde, who, if not wrong, is not always ...”

“... out hundreds of Christmas cards. Despite giants of jazz singing such as Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald, this branch of music remains essentially a masculine preserve – again, this is a subject Val Wilmer frequently touches, but never seems to grasp – and from Donald Spoto’s life of Lotte Lenya it seems that the music-theatre of Kurt Weill, for all ...”