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“... at the end I had tears in my eyes.’ Among the Bloomsbury ‘items’ commissioned by Kenneth and Jane Clark was a grand Wedgwood dinner service created by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant in 1935. The two artists chose to paint the 48 plates (out of 140 pieces) with a series of portraits of great women, including Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf ...”

“... home, I thought. ‘Estimate: $4000-6000.’ And further along a hand-knitted cardigan, ‘with a brown geometric pattern and 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 ...”

“... Girls. You daren’t skip-read for fear of being ticked off by Commander Dalgleish for misquoting Jane Austen. Despite (or because of) all this, Original Sin has been a notable success as far as that freakish segment of the population, the purchasers of hardback novels, is concerned. Dame Phyllis is back where she belongs, at the top of the charts, after a ...”

“... that we are reading an exact, first-hand account from this invisible man? Housman rose, placed a brown-covered small octavo pamphlet (of paged proofs?) upon the reading-desk and immediately began to read. He spoke slowly, with precision, in a pleasant, even, low, but clear and well-modulated voice, not raising his eyes, and frequently twitching the pamphlet ...”

“... in the Austenesque way (‘to be sensible of something’); refers to Pushkin being in ‘a brown study’ and suffering from ‘the ague’; and mentions that Pushkin and his boisterous mates one night ‘kicked up a terrible bobbery’. This is a big book, but it has a rakish, propulsive air, not unlike Pushkin’s glittering short novels and ...”

“... remain secret even with everybody looking at them.’ Her columns are vivid depictions of what Jane Jacobs called ‘the ballet of the city sidewalk’, but they also display a fascination with the forces that were making that life extinct. In ‘The Last Days of New York City’ (1955), she considers the ‘rumour’ that Robert Moses planned to run ‘an ...”

“... every footnote, stuffing the commentary with post-its, triple-underlining phrases like ‘his brown shoes’, only pausing occasionally to see the white fountain of remixed and continuous life that John Shade saw when his heart stopped. Nabokov sets up problems to which it seems there should be answers, but he does not give answers, he gives rewards. That ...”

“... Picturedrome on Wortley Road. Here were Alexis Smith, Eve Arnold, Charles Boyer, and Tarzan’s Jane (and Mia Farrow’s mother) Maureen O’Sullivan. The four of us from Beyond the Fringe had been invited as a unit and Dudley Moore had been prevailed on (may even have volunteered) to play the piano. With Coward in the room this was perhaps foolhardy and ...”

“... and George Foreman, an extravagant pan-African festival where everyone from Miriam Makeba to James Brown came to perform at the football stadium in Kinshasa. Still, ‘it wasn’t all circuses,’ Van Reybrouck writes, ‘there was also bread.’ Mobutu achieved some of Lumumba’s principal goals, restoring Congo’s territorial unity and nationalising the ...”

“... by Salinger’s widow, Colleen, and possibly by his literary agent and by a few editors at Little, Brown, the publisher of the original four books. Or maybe not; maybe at this stage it stops with the widow and the son, or even just the son. Matt Salinger is a onetime film actor and producer, now 59, retired from the movie business and living in ...”

“... of both of these books) by Vice-President Dan Quayle’s announced upset over an episode of Murphy Brown, a television programme in which a single woman in her thirties found herself pregnant, decided to have her baby – and did so. Searching for someone or something to blame for the current state of the United States (including the recent LA riots), the ...”

“... to the differences between melancholy, and sadness, and nostalgia, and to what Turgenev, and what Jane Austen, and what Hardy, could tell us about these things, and I, after a silence that I had kept for twenty minutes or so, plucked up my courage to bare my soul to the company around the table, and I said that I knew nothing more melancholy than sun after ...”

“... was for sale.In her urbanist manifesto The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jane Jacobs wrote about ‘eyes on the street’: about the way that pedestrian traffic, people moving around – or sitting around – in public, kept a place safe and more than safe: convivial, gregarious. I think of what has come to my city as ‘the great ...”

“... portrait of such informal ravishing loveliness one felt one’s own complex sort of gratitude. (Jane Freilicher’s gorgeous gouaches come to mind.) Beauty is Truth. But she seemed not to realise when she had produced a winner. Her pictures hang on the walls indiscriminately; the stunning ones mixed in with a lot of mermaids, dreamy girls in ...”

“... I knew only that I had to survive,’ Jane Lazarre writes about the process of giving birth.I pushed hard only because that was the only way to get the bastard out. And because pushing is not an urge; it is a demand backed up by all the violence your body, turned suddenly into an enemy, has at its command … pushing with all my might, I experienced for a moment what I would feel for hours with my next child – the certainty that I was dying ...”