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“... symbolism in the process, and begins to look like a writerly city. No such difficulties beset Alice Adams, whose world is writerly from the start. Superior Women is a kind of compendium not so much of American attitudes or American history as of attitudes to attitudes, so to speak – the hearsay version of contemporary life. Much is ...”

“... a direct and lucid account of Hepburn’s career, from early films such as Little Women and Alice Adams, through the comedies with Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy, notably Bringing Up Baby and Adam’s Rib, to The African Queen and then Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and On Golden Pond, into the story of his many talks and weekends with her, and he ...”

“... of the fragment and then an attempt to complete and translate it. The book’s author, Charles Adams, may have been trying to compensate for the flimsy plot. Twin girls, who share a psychic ability to feel each other’s pain, are separated as children when the younger, Catherine, is stolen by Gypsies. The elder, Gertie, grows up and gets married but is ...”

“... which is the lachrymose and androgynous Mourning Figure sculpted by August St Guldens for Henry Adams’s unhappy wife Clover (whose name always puts me in mind of an overworked pit pony). And there in the grass is a stone slab, bearing the names and dates of birth of Vidal and his lifelong companion Howard Austen. The hyphens that come after the years ...”

“... famous pieces, like the eloquent response of 1914 to a ‘melancholy outpouring’ from Henry Adams, in which James pronounced himself ‘that queer monster the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility’, and urged his friend to ‘cultivate’ his consciousness in full knowledge that ‘the past that was our lives is at the bottom of ...”

“... at the New School and began teaching poetry workshops at St Mark’s Church, collaborating with Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley and others. John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara were their guiding lights. A new American poetics was taking shape: daily and referential, tough and casual. Between 1967 and 1969 Mayer edited, with Vito Acconci, the ...”

“... Fiction, quite rightly, because the best of it – as in the stories of James Tiptree, alias Alice Sheldon, author of ‘The Women Men Don’t See’ – has got past social concerns and the bewailing of present conditions to redefinitions (again), and a search for future propositions that will ‘stand’. This has nothing in common with ...”

“... and Caroline’s half-brother, Blaise. The most important historical figures are Hay, Henry Adams, William Randolph Hearst, and Presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, though there are cameo appearances from many others, including Adams’s brother Brooks, author of the imperialist manifesto Law of Civilisation ...”

“... Boys and Girls Come out to Play, currently awaiting the offer of a production. The American poet Alice Goodman wrote two libretti for the American minimalist composer John Adams: Nixon in China, with a text mostly in rhyming couplets, and The Death of Klinghoffer. She has also finished fresh dialogue for a Glyndebourne ...”

“... Pierpont Morgan has never said “I” in his life.’ Strouse would agree. ‘He was, as Henry Adams said of Theodore Roosevelt, “pure act”.’ But Schlegel goes on to say, ‘if you could pierce through him, you’d find panic and emptiness in the middle’, which Strouse wouldn’t say of Morgan. He may lack any very complicated internal life, or the ...”

“... he appeared like a wraith or a tramp or a bag of bones, a hollow-eyed, coughing wretch. Henry Adams thought he looked like ‘an insane stork’, and to the people of Samoa in the 1890s he was a king or a sort of god, Tusi Tala, ‘teller of tales’. He is variously described by witnesses as ...”

“... took place at Beijing airport on Monday, 21 February 1972. It’s also the opening scene of John Adams’s opera Nixon in China, premiered in Houston in 1987, and staged again at the London Coliseum over a few evenings last summer. An actual occurrence then, but also, as Adams and his librettist ...”

“... in 1932, the hero of which, as Kenneth Lynn cogently expresses it, is not ‘a haunted Nick Adams, or a crippled Jake Barnes, or a hollowed-out Frederic Henry, but an overbearing know-it-all named Ernest Hemingway’. Max Eastman said Hemingway had false hair on his chest. Gertrude Stein, in The Autobiography of ...”

“... and Linda Simon (1998). There are also fine portraits in Jean Strouse’s biography of Alice James (1980) and in Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club (2001). No lack of attention, then, but Richardson’s book is very welcome, in part because of his refusal to stop worrying about his subject, and his ability finally to let his enthusiasm overcome his ...”

“... of utopian. For that one can look to the Aboriginal community Utopia, two hundred miles north of Alice Springs and often cited as among the most deprived in Australia. In 2013 John Pilger made a film about the place, whose name seems to be an anglicised corruption of uturupa, an aboriginal word for ‘sand hill’. Booze is banned in Utopia, which would have ...”