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“... 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 directing. To date I’ve written two drafts of the script and am halfway through a third.The house where the story happened, 23 Gloucester Crescent in ...”

“... message as well as its method,’ says Edna Longley): ‘Lob-lie-by-the-fire, Jack Cade/ Jack Smith, Jack Moon, poor Jack of every trade.’ With the line, ‘One of the Lords of No Man’s Land, good Lob’, we get a topical piece of ambiguity: the poem was written in 1915, when Thomas had already enlisted (he was killed at Arras in 1917). Thomas set out ...”

“... who claimed to have been abused in this way in childhood. The first survivor story, by Michelle Smith, a Canadian, had been published in 1980. It gave an account of memories she had recovered when she was having therapy after a miscarriage. Most of these memories had been accessed in a hypnotic trance. She said her mother had taken her to the satanic ...”

“... the casting out of a personal demon – thought of as the unappeased spirit of the dead Joan Vollmer Burroughs, shot through the forehead in Mexico City. Or the malignant, pre-Columbian entity that caused that event. A Navajo shaman presiding over the exorcism blew on a bone whistle, touched Burroughs with a burning coal. The shaman later admitted ...”

“... was not.’ D.G. Bridson, Laurence Gilliam, Jack Dillon, Douglas Cleverdon, Olive Shapley and Joan Littlewood produced programmes which ranged from adaptations of The Waste Land to features on homelessness and unemployment, from the uncompromisingly highbrow to the popular. Their ‘features’ broke away from the strait jacket of the formal talk or the ...”

“... it could have belonged to someone else with the same initials – the Stratford draper William Smith, for instance – but the possibility remains strong that it was Shakespeare’s. It is certainly a genuine ring of the period, and there are other pointers in its favour. The field where it was found, Mill Close, was on land that Shakespeare had owned: it ...”

“... attention and delight that looks into the Betjeman world and sees church interiors and Pams and Joan Hunter-Dunns. But metre and manner preclude those bursts of lyric magnificence: Betjeman essays the mock-sententious. He becomes knowing, over-conscious, collusive with the reader; the local and parodic tone invites a mockery of its own world, and of course ...”

“... of implying that a home visit in old age from Kurt Cobain or a graveside serenade from Patti Smith has the same cultural importance as the writing of Nova Express and The Wild Boys. Burroughs’s actual achievement seems incidental to the glitzy mythologising of his remaining intimates, though still a bone of contention gnawed by literati. Hardly ...”

“... Or were they hooked up to a truth in the objective world, whose creator ensured their existence? Joan of Arc’s trial returned obsessively to this problem: were the voices in her mind, in which case they might have been conjured by the arch deceiver, Satan? Or were they ghosts of the sort who often appeared to warn sinners to reform – no diabolical tricks ...”

“... Promised Land it’s vodka or cognac. During the doomed love affair in Arch of Triumph, Ravic and Joan drank Calvados in such quantities that the novel – a bestseller – touched off an American sales boom so wild that Normandy ran out of apples (the producer who filmed the book is supposed to have ordered 54 cases of the stuff on set). Remarque was a ...”

“... no one ever died with warm feet.’ O. Henry slowly raised his head from the pillow, commented ‘Joan of Arc did,’ and promptly expired. The promptness of expiry is typical of the genre, eliding the gap of time between last words and last breath. It’s an exemplary piece of narrative, with the master of the short-story surprise ending providing one, off ...”

“... said she was ‘baffled’ by her own behaviour – she had a much nicer TV set at home. Shonola Smith, 22, pleaded guilty, along with her sister and a friend, to ‘entering’ Argos in Croydon: ‘The tragedy is that you are all of previous good character,’ the judge said, as he sentenced them to six months each. Chelsea Ives, the 18-year-old ‘shamed ...”

“... writes that ‘during the years-long squabble over which of us lady writers would become the next Joan Didion, no one had tried to claim the title of David Foster Wallace for girls’ – why? The answer is obvious: too sweaty. Wallace perspires freely in the foreground, while Paltrow perches mauve-and-beigely on her stool on a far stage. He is dead and she ...”

“... dramaturg. ‘How shall we slaughter the little bastard?’ snorted Olivier, handing his letter to Joan Plowright, whom he had married in the interim. Tynan had contributed, Olivier believed, to his – Olivier’s – first wife’s mental breakdown by his derisive reviews. More recently, he had attacked the Chichester Festival, under cover of which Olivier ...”

“... of their relations to each other. Hockney, in a recent radio conversation with Edward Lucie-Smith, drew attention to the marvellous painting of the mother teaching her child to walk. In the distortions of the mother’s face one sees all the anxiety and love a mother has for her child as he begins, literally, to move away from her: in the equally ...”