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“... New York City Ballet, ‘to impose a native meaning on a recalcitrant alien dance tradition’. Agnes deMille too broke through in the 1940s, with a ballet called Rodeo in 1942, its score commissioned from Copland. The following year her choreography for Oklahoma! revolutionised Broadway. The composer Richard ...”

“... written two ballet scores: Billy the Kid for Ballet Caravan in 1938 and Rodeo for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1942. But this new score, commissioned by the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation in July 1942, was not for a ballet company but for Graham, America’s high priestess of modern dance. The ‘inner life’ that emerged was complex. The ...”

“... the need for his alimentary system to be emptied before he dances (‘quand tout sera sorti de mon intestin’), and a last satisfactory visit to the costume-maker, whose work he praises and whose poor family he helps. But from then on he’s running and running in the snow, sometimes keeping pace with a sympathetic horse, or he’s precisely planning a ...”

“... of augury, oracles and fortune-telling); while ‘Tully’s Offices’, his treatise on duty (De officiis), was the ethical handbook of many 17th-century English gentlemen. But this admiration did not survive the rise of intellectual philhellenism; and for much of the 19th and 20th centuries Cicero’s philosophy, all six modern volumes of it, was ...”

“... My Life was ‘the first statement in our literature of woman as an artist’. The choreographer Agnes deMille remembers that the public’s response to the memoir showed ‘how we longed for what was passionate, even if outrageous’. The book also, she wrote, ‘proved dreadfully unnerving to the young. Several ...”

“... creatures from another world, or that of cabaret dancers with their thrillingly shameful displays. Agnes deMille’s introduction is another good thing about this book. She, too, cannot praise Isadora enough, but she does it with the advantage of having actually seen her dance. It was 1918, late in Duncan’s ...”

“... and Paris was the hub of modernity as well as the right place to lead a traditional vie de bohème. Elizabeth’s lasted seven months before her return to a short stint at Poughkeepsie’s Vassar College, where she mainly did student theatre and entertained beaux from Yale, before decamping for New York to find real opportunities – more fun, more ...”