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“... matching knitted belt. Worn by Marilyn Monroe in 1962 and featured in a series of photographs by George Barris taken on the beach in Santa Monica, California. Estimate: $30,000-50,000.’ In the corner of the window there stood a halter-neck dress from the movie Let’s Make Love. I thought of Marilyn and Yves Mont-and posing for the cameras with their ...”

“... happiness. ‘Love,’ she asserts in the third of her ‘Three Valentines’, which develops a George Herbert-inspired set of conceits between Love and the avian, ‘is feathered like a bird/To keep him warm,/To keep him safe from harm’. In ‘Rain towards Morning’, one of four love poems collected in A Cold Spring (1955), she exults with unusual lack ...”

“... to promote intellectual and religious freedom within the republic, Joseph Smith and William Miller saw liberation as the fruit not of revolution but of exodus. Smith envisioned a new kingdom of the saints and led his followers to the West; the Millerites awaited the end of the world, and prepared themselves for the journey to a celestial ...”

“... such mandarins as Alfred Kazin, Gore Vidal, Benjamin de Mott and – at inordinate length – George Steiner in the New Yorker (a bite at the hand which has, most famously, fed Updike): ‘An occasion to marvel once again that not since the Periclean Greeks has there been a configuration of intellectual aptitude, spiritual breadth, and radical intuitional ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on, HMS Pinafore is still afloat. Refitted and relaunched by directors like Joseph Papp, Jonathan Miller, Ken Russell and Mark Savage as post-copyright, post-D’Oyly Carte G&S, not only Pinafore, but The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado and Princess Ida too have been successfully revived on both sides of the Atlantic. Showbusiness professionals now admire ...”

“... the two most important architects of the Versailles peace settlement, Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George, both acknowledged Mazzini’s inspiration. According to Lloyd George, ‘the map of Europe as we see it today is the map of Joseph Mazzini. He was the prophet of free nationality ... He taught us not merely the rights ...”

“... Bishop’s notebooks, her correspondence (largely with Lowell, May Swenson and a friend, Margaret Miller), as well as biographies and a handful of critical studies. These notes amount almost to a second book in themselves, and are sometimes more interesting than the drafts they support. While many have been thrilled to encounter ‘new’ Bishop ...”

“... Jekyll and Mr Hyde appeared in 1886, the year of Vyvyan’s birth. These were the years, as Karl Miller wrote in Doubles, when ‘a hunger for pseudonyms, masks, new identities, new conceptions of human nature, declared itself.’ Thus Dr Jekyll could announce with full conviction: ‘This, too, was myself’ as he became ‘a stranger in my own ...”

“... things, were actually both with women – Minny Temple, who inspired the heroines of Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady, and the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, whose tangled intimacy with James provoked some of his most celebrated short stories. Like his sister Alice, Tóibín says, James ‘recoiled from engagements, deep companionship, the ...”

“... a person of no nonsense: ‘You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind – no, sir!’ In tragedy the significance of names tends to bleed out belatedly, as part of a ...”

“... of a play of Merrill’s called The Bait. During a soliloquy ‘heads swivelled as “Arthur Miller and Dylan Thomas … stumbled out,”’ ‘passing judgment’, as Hammer puts it, ‘with their feet’. ‘I learned what Mr Miller, with uncanny insight, had whispered in Dylan’s ear shortly after the curtain ...”

“... of letters, having paid close attention to the published correspondence of Balzac, Flaubert and George Sand, and alert to the power of editors. After reading Sidney Colvin’s edition of the letters of his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, he wrote: ‘One has the vague sense of omissions and truncations – one smells the thing unprinted.’ In the years ...”

“... bought the house in which I shall be murdered.’There are different accounts of how Bacon met George Dyer late in 1963. One is that Dyer, a rather good-looking cat burglar from the East End of London, fell through Bacon’s skylight like a gift from heaven, and that Bacon threatened to call the police if Dyer didn’t have sex with him. They are more ...”

“... he pours scorn on it – too stridently, he now confesses – in an essay on Orwell and Henry Miller called ‘Outside the Whale’. Arnold visits the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse and contemplates it through the lens of his famous melancholy. The new world powerless to be born was that foreseen in the heroic but failed efforts of the Romantic ...”