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“... her rule. This motherless child, who, by 1544, had already seen so many ‘mothers’ come and go (Jane Seymour in childbirth seven years earlier, Catherine Howard beheaded five years after that), and who would see – and bring about – more women’s deaths in her time, had also been made fatherless, when by Act of ...”

“... shameless faker’ – a view later revised – and his ‘dungaree-wearing Lizzie wife’, Jane, whose own arrangement was the mirror-image of Burroughs’s with Joan. There is also Auden’s secretary Alan Ansen, who gets no credit here for working on the Naked Lunch manuscript with Ginsberg. Auden himself is briskly invoked (‘Auden say I am a ...”

“... pictures have the gift of total visual recall. Matisse is said to have had it. So is Berenson. Howard Hodgkin has it. My own visual memory is uncertain and self-deluding, except when it comes to Kitaj. His pictures come to my mind’s eye exactly, or so I believe, and they come with all the power of suppressed material, but on command. I wish I knew what ...”

“... schools of early and mid-20th-century planning – the Garden City movement founded by Ebenezer Howard and architectural modernism – were anti-urban, associating cities with slums, disease and pollution. And their wariness of high-density living infected government policy across much of the world in the postwar decades, with city leaders encouraging the ...”

“... Charles Howard Hinton​ was a Victorian mathematician and theorist of the fourth dimension, the scandal of whose conviction for bigamy led him to lose his job as a schoolmaster and to exile himself with his family, travelling first to Japan and then to America. Mark Blacklock’s novel shrewdly and even slyly manages to reflect Hinton’s theories without staking the success of the book on them ...”

“... interest in the case in 1921, but his contribution is rather reminiscent of Mr Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre enjoining the Lowood girls to be glad of their burned breakfast: ‘We cannot fully enjoy or rightly estimate a hundred years of English poetry unless we fully enjoy Dryden.’ The need for help in fully enjoying Dryden becomes clear as soon as one ...”

“... Bacon​ was 39 when he tipped up at the club in 1948. He was introduced to it by Brian Howard, the poet and journalist who is Miles Malpractice in Vile Bodies and ‘two-thirds’ of Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited (the other third, Evelyn Waugh said, was Harold Acton). Howard is now best known for a ...”

“... in place.Over the next ten years he became a star. He initially worked as a contract player at Howard Hughes’s RKO. (Hughes, a control-freak, had Mitchum’s house bugged: Mitchum, with characteristic contrariness, always insisted he liked Hughes.) His best roles were largely in film noir and dark westerns, the most famous of them Out of the Past and ...”

“... was preferable ‘to anything else, however strong’. In another essay, Hughes dwells on Howard Hodgkin’s distinguished family background, which includes ‘Roger Fry, the great English critic who gave Post-Impressionism its name’. Hughes frequently argues that contemporary artists have lost the rigour that academic training imparts ...”

“... it borrows much of its tone from the mocking, spirited irony of Trollope, or Thackeray, or even Jane Austen; Sturgis loves to assassinate a character before he or (more usually) she has had a chance to do anything for themselves. Belchamber is a novel of aristocratic life, centring on a great Jacobean house, and peopled with a marvellously unlikeable cast ...”

“... and her friends were few and from her own class. Her situation, she comforted herself, was like Jane Austen’s. She was contented: ‘I have had a rather uneventful life, thank God.’ Her greatest grief (‘almost’), Beauman writes, was when, near the end of her life, the New Yorker stopped accepting her stories. Still, a biographer must fill her pages ...”

“... though occasionally, almost miraculously, it did. That I can remember the deaths both of Leslie Howard and of Carole Lombard chalked up on the newspaper-sellers’ boards in City Square hardly counts. But there was the afternoon sometime in the 1940s when I was out shopping with Mam and we were walking up Thornton’s Arcade and saw coming down a vast man ...”

“... the committee that he had fired them. Among the writers in question: Philip and Julius Epstein and Howard Koch (authors of the screenplay for Casablanca), Irwin Shaw, Albert Maltz, Clifford Odets and Ring Lardner Jr. This surrender occurred at a key moment, Hoberman says, as reports of flying saucers turned oddly epidemic in the summer of 1947. As for the ...”

“... way of working. He simply didn’t know any other.’ He was not much good at sharing either, as Howard Koch, Herman Mankiewicz, John Houseman and others discovered to their cost. ‘Orson’s concern was entirely for Orson,’ Joan Fontaine, his co-star in Jane Eyre, remembers. James G. Stewart, the veteran dubbing mixer ...”

“... was the wording on the landing cards destroyed by the Home Office in 2010. Paulette Wilson, Hubert Howard and the many others whose shocking stories are told in The Windrush Betrayal by Amelia Gentleman, the journalist whose investigations led to the uncovering of the scandal, came in on their parents’ British passports: from the moment of emancipation in ...”