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“... In January 1945, as she was preparing her collection North & South for publication, Elizabeth Bishop wrote to her publishers to say she was worried that she had written nothing about the war: The fact that none of these poems deal directly with the war, at a time when so much war poetry is being published, will, I am afraid, leave me open to reproach ...”

“... of the price) is that it was made by Proust’s tailor. 18 April. A pre-operation session at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson wing of UCH down Huntley Street, in which Siobhan, a nice, cheerful and silly nurse, takes me through the same questionnaire I answered twice last week. She then takes me in to see the anaesthetist, and he goes through the same ...”

“... sets, finessed by fashionable architects, are like parodies of facilities promised for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. And nobody but the owners can get at them. What could be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle of water, a three-dimensional David Hockney which will never be disturbed by a thrashing alien presence? Neighbours ...”

“... his mamma to come are pretty slim. John Gielgud was once telling me about Mrs Simpson and how smart she was. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘she’d have made a disastrous queen. Didn’t go to the theatre at all.’ 19 January. Alan Bates opens tonight at the Barbican in the RSC production of Antony and Cleopatra. The version put on at Stratford opened with ...”

“... in one of the very few ships leaving from Port Said. Micheline got berths on the troopship Queen Elizabeth. On 18 July, she left with her daughters from Cairo’s central station. It was a madhouse, the platforms were crammed with every sort of refugee, desperate to attach themselves to any part of a train, including the roof. Many of them were Jews who had ...”

“... act of naivety,’ Sharp wrote in The Politics of Non-Violent Action. Quite the opposite: it’s a smart approach which puts the adversary, usually a state and its security forces, in a delicate position: they can concede ground against their will or opt for repression, lose the consent of the undecided and swell the opposition’s ranks. Another ...”

“... of ethnic minority groups – to ensure that the university remains a stronghold of conservatism. Smart conservatives know this, which is the reason Kaufmann has praised the right’s use of its disproportionately deep pockets to fund initiatives like those of the Koch Foundation, and expressed admiration for DeSantis’s strategy of stacking universities ...”

“... studies . . .Newspapers?Oh, the Daily Mail would be considered middle-class and therefore rather smart. No, not smart, but respectable. Respectability was the aim.Can you remember any of the lodgers?I can remember them fairly distinctly. My mother hated them.Did you feel neglected because of them?No, because she treated ...”

“... displayed by some of the more loquacious and hypocritical members of the international Jazz Age smart set. (Far more needs to be said – by someone, sometime – about that perplexing, puckish, self-censoring and altogether sinister ‘period’ sprite, the celebrity-chasing and deeply closeted impresaria Elsa Maxwell.) All three of Cohen’s subjects were ...”

“... and dark is the abyss of the theatre.’ On the night his play closed James wrote to the actress Elizabeth Robins: ‘It has been a great relief to feel that one of the most detestable incidents of my life has closed.’ On 22 February he wrote to his brother: ‘Oscar Wilde’s farce which followed Guy Domville is, I believe, a great success – and with ...”

“... Children’s Services manager, you’d be hoping they’d send you a person exactly like her, a smart, Guardian-reading liberal. She is unsentimental about England’s social problems and has spent a lot of time engaging with them. She has a CBE for her work helping children and their families in London and is unsparing in her criticism of central ...”