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“... a life of Burne-Jones, appeared two years earlier, in 1975, when she was nearly 60. Until then child-rearing, teaching, a difficult marriage and the constant struggle to keep the family afloat – which failed several times, once literally when their houseboat sank in the Thames – had left little time for writing. Other biographies followed but it was ...”

“... through Milton and Blake and Keats, to David Jones, Gascoyne, Dylan Thomas, Nicholas Moore, to Lee Harwood’s Cable Street, Bill Griffiths’s Whitechapel and Brian Catling’s The Stumbling Block. London infected its interpreters, soliciting contributions to an open-ended project. The names of the poets were the stanzas of a continuous book. Aidan ...”

“... get serious, and there’s less levity, much less humour. In ‘The Runner’ the abduction of a child from a park is observed by a jogger and a woman who lives in his apartment building. She is quick to make assumptions about the incident: The father gets out and takes the little boy … It’s all around us, isn’t it? They have babies before they’re ...”

“... situation’. On the same day, Marilyn Butler was equally effusive on Radio 3 and Hermione Lee assured us in the Observer that the author has ‘impeccably heroic socialist and feminist credentials’. My daughter-in-law brought home Cosmopolitan with a long extract, prettily illustrated, and an astounding comment from Emma Dally: ‘Although it is not ...”

“... His skill arouses Margarita, who has ‘a passion for all people who do anything to perfection’. Lee Goff’s peculiar skill evokes the same delight and horror as that of the perfect assassin, though he is dealing with the effects of other people’s murders, and not doing any killing himself (except of pigs and rabbits). It is a fine thing, rare in fiction ...”

“... mother says. ‘And that is why you are a writer.’ Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart was born an only child in Leningrad on 5 July 1972. His parents met at music school. Nina was headstrong and from a good family; she played the piano, and later gave lessons. Semyon, a tough but witty son of a soldier killed in the Second World War, had ambitions of becoming an ...”

“... was the only writer on Monroe to spot these moments of what might seem like odd affinity. Lee Strasberg’s daughter, Susan, remembered a self-portrait Monroe drew alongside a sketch of a Negro girl in ‘a sad-looking dress, one sock falling down around her ankles’. And according to Gloria Steinem, when the Mocambo nightclub in Los Angeles was ...”

“... was to all intents and purposes a native American – an ‘imaginary portrait’, as Sidney Lee wrote in 1898, of the ‘aboriginal savage of the New World’? This is the principal theme of the Vaughans’ learned and sceptical cultural history of Shakespeare’s Caliban, a book which traces both the construction of the various American readings of The ...”

“... turned-out postman picking his way through the rubble lining Frankfurt’s city hall. In Munich, Lee Miller was photographed soaping herself in Hitler’s bath. Walter Sanders caught the wife and daughter of an American soldier drinking tea in a luxurious dining car, looking out at the train next to them, in which DPs were squashed into boxcars. Sollors has ...”

“... unexpectedly through the yard. The house, and much of the rest of the Palisades section of Fort Lee, was built around 1925, at a time when the Garden City Movement was underway in Britain, and, independently, Frederick Law Olmsted and Clarence Stein’s Garden Suburb Movement was taking hold in America. This neighbourhood, across the Hudson from uptown ...”

“... life: a dandy’s masquerade of perfect equipoise.Porter (1891-1964) was the cosseted surviving child of three born to Kate and Sam Porter, a pharmacist in Peru, Indiana. He inherited his aptitude for music from his father, a good pianist with an attractive tenor voice. ‘I suppose he started me writing lyrics,’ Porter said – he wrote his first song ...”

“... to Shaw’s need to wish away the intrusion into Shaw’s infancy of George John Vandaleur Lee – or, rather, the intrusion of the suspicion that Lee had been the lover of Shaw’s mother and was, perhaps, Shaw’s real father. In the teacher-pupil (or sculptor-statue) relation of Higgins to Eliza Doolittle, Mr ...”

“... sinfulness: ‘greedy loves and greedy hates’. Hamlet walks in the Supernatural Tales of Vernon Lee, alias Violet Paget, a friend of James, and of friends of his including Edith Wharton. Her supernatural vein would appear to be an embellishment and burlesque of the 18th-century Italy imagined by this pioneer art historian (and pacifist). One of these tales ...”

“... at his local garden centre. For the show about cars he remembered the ones he’d coveted as a child. It’s never easy to know how seriously to take all this stuff, given his predilection for faking his own biography, but that is part of the pleasure (as it is with his memoirs). You often get the sense that he treats the whole thing as a big joke, and ...”

“... The major contribution of the English theatre to last year’s Brecht centenary was Lee Hall’s dazzling version of Mr Puntila and His Man Matti, presented by the Right Size, a touring company led by the comic actors Sean Foley and Hamish McColl. Their prologue goes some way to explaining why the Anglophone response to the Brechtfest was so muted ...”