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“... hit a spell of turbulence. As Buerkle explains, early attempts to portray Salomon as another Anne Frank had served her well enough in the 1960s. The presentation of her work and life in terms of a Jewish catastrophe was always implicit in the curating, but for this approach to work the notion of innocence – or at the very least bourgeois German ...”

“... been invoked at all? Would not the work in question be yet more authoritative and persuasive as frank documentary or autobiography? At the centre of Have the men had enough?, a relentlessly monocentric work, is Grandma, who suffers from senile dementia. In the moderate stage of the illness she still remembers the names and faces of those close to her, and ...”

“... popular biography of Thackeray we have had in the last nine years, taking its place alongside Anne Monsarrat’s Thackeray: Uneasy Victorian (1980) and Margaret Forster’s sprightly ‘autobiography’, Thackeray: Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman (1978). (Rather meanly, Peters leaves both competitors out of her ‘Select Bibliography’.) All three ...”

“... set out in a densely written ‘Prologue’ bristling with structuralist terminology. Frank Kermode, who admires the book, points out in his foreword that Anglo-Saxon readers are likely to find this introductory section difficult, and its manner unfamiliar. The warning is fair. Nevertheless, like Evans’s theory of ‘discrepant ...”

“... Idon't care what Wystan says,’ Frank O’Hara wrote to Kenneth Koch. ‘I’d rather be dead than not have France around me like a rhinestone dog-collar.’ He was responding to Auden’s admonition on reading O’Hara’s and John Ashbery’s entries for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1955: ‘I think you (and John, too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any “surrealistic” style, namely of confusing authentic non-logical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue ...”

“... friend called Jane all his life. ‘I don’t think he had the faintest idea what laundry was,’ Frank Auerbach said. ‘He put it into this basket and it came back from Jane immaculately laundered.’ After he left school, his father took a piece of sculpture – a sandstone horse, almost two feet high, ‘three legs serving convincingly as four’ – that ...”

“... works of art: his cadences return in Pound’s Pisan Cantos; he appears as a blonde in a poem by Frank O’Hara; he becomes the name of a band, the Cocteau Twins. It’s as if he can beam into other worlds, as his voice does, through radio, in his 1950 film Orphée, transmitting from an elusive elsewhere. Cocteau’s life, as Arnaud tells it, mirrors these ...”

“... allegations of misbehaviour lost Kevin Spacey his job on House of Cards, he made a video as Frank Underwood, the scheming fictional president he played in the series, and this video was so creepy as to make him seem deranged. ‘You trusted me,’ he said, addressing the camera in silky menace mode. ‘Even though you knew you shouldn’t. So we’re ...”

“... Frank Kermode’s review of the new Gissing biography (page 9) brings to mind a project which I have long thought someone ought to tackle: a fearless update of New Grub Street. The job wouldn’t be too taxing – indeed, in many cases, it would be all too easy to attach contemporary names to Gissing’s sunken literary types: his principled dullards as well as his sleek chancers ...”

“... when she sees that no one else can possibly tackle the Jabberwocky, and also understands, through Anne Hathaway’s nicely fussy performance as the White Queen, that a supposedly principled opposition to violence can be merely precious, a wimpish pose. Meanwhile the movie has begun to revolve around, and be governed by, two figures: the Red Queen and the Mad ...”

“... he mused, turning sightless eyes on me (cataracts, he explained) and shaking his head in frank dubiety, ‘walking all the way to Eton.’ On a television in the pub beside the Bedfont Estate where we stopped for a Coke an hour later, Cameron was still at it. In the flock-heavy bar a circular vending rack offered drinkers – of whom there were none ...”

“... of the innumerable songs voiced by female speakers might actually have been composed by women? Anne Klinck’s Anthology of Ancient and Medieval Woman’s Song collects songs in the female voice; the repertoires extend from classical Greece and Rome through early medieval Ireland, Anglo-Saxon England, Scandinavia, and multicultural Spain to the more ...”

“... I haven’heard. He is Daron Aric Hagen, and Shining Brow is an opera about the early life of Frank Lloyd Wright, commissioned by Madison Opera, Wisconsin, Wright’s home state. The work was premièred there in April, but not having heard it, I cannot speak for the opera’s music. That, though, would not appear to be much of a drawback. Muldoon’s text ...”

“... forward and look round me at him, smile to herself and sit back again.’ When George’s daughter Anne was born in 1919 and son Michael in 1921, the sisters became enthusiastic babysitters and general chroniclers of their brother’s household. ‘I think George enjoys the thrill she gets when she gives her name in shops,’ Lolly wrote. ‘Mrs ...”

“... For his half-niece Anne Wharton, writing immediately after his death in 1680 at the age of 33, the poet Rochester was the guide who would have led her ‘right in wisdom’s way’: He civilised the rude and taught the young, Made fools grow wise, such artful music hung Upon his useful, kind, instructing tongue. Rochester’s modern editors and biographers are well aware of Wharton’s elegy, but they are not interested in the personage it describes ...”