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“... some stories don’t call for another colour. Pale grey, for example, might be about right for Anne Fontaine’s Gemma Bovery (2014), a stately, not obviously funny film in which an English woman stumbles into Flaubert’s plot and dies not deliberately by arsenic poisoning but accidentally by swallowing, or rather failing to swallow, a chunk of ...”

“... or like Audrey Tautou, the latest face of Chanel No. 5, who also plays the young Coco Chanel in Anne Fontaine’s Coco before Chanel. So far as one can tell, Chanel was never fully contented (she boasted that she did not require ‘that daily dose of poison, recently invented, that we call happiness’ and her restless scissors were always ...”

“... outdo it in innovative boldness and size. The architect the duke commissioned was Pierre-François Fontaine, and it is the premise of Richard Sennett’s attractive novel that he chose for his assistant a young Englishman who was just finishing his studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Frederick Courtland was the son of an architect who had learned his ...”

“... I met Anne Sexton six months before her suicide, in April 1974. My colleague Carol Smith and I were doing a series of interviews with women writers, and we had heard how Sexton and her friend Maxine Kumin had worked together for years, talking about their poems in long telephone sessions when neither of then could get out of the house ...”

“... a practical joke played by their uncle, Cardinal Mazarin, on their youngest sister, Marie-Anne, who was then about six. (Marie-Anne was to marry Maurice-Godefroy de la Tour d’Auvergne, duc de Bouillon.) The cardinal, who doesn’t otherwise come across as a fun-loving sort, begins by teasing Marie-...”

“... I still looked good’ – ‘a young Lauren Bacall the morning after’, ‘a dishevelled Joan Fontaine’. Plus, she’s rich and expensively educated. She studied art history at Columbia (and is therefore ‘cultured’, according to Reva). She was born into privilege and now lives on an inheritance from her parents. She used to work at a Chelsea ...”

“... and Citizen Kane; The Glass Key is in cinemas; there’s talk of Gary Cooper, Veronica Lake, Joan Fontaine. There are egg creams, charlottes russes and clams casino. Agnes and Eddie’s sister Brianne once danced in the Follies, and Agnes now works as a part-time seamstress, trimming ‘sequinned toques’. Ordinary New Yorkers ride trolleys and the IND, a ...”

“... shaky. All is not lost, though. What these writers have in common – Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, Rebecca West, P.L. Travers, Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Bishop, Nadine Gordimer and Anne Sexton, who appear in the volume alongside the writers already mentioned – is that they are not men, which is not as ...”

“... and Trisha Brown, who refreshed dance with everyday gestures and basic tasks. At the same time, as Anne Wagner has argued, Nauman held on to historical sculpture as a ‘shadow antithesis’ and undid ‘the outworn ethos of monolith and monument’ from the inside. The demythologising of this ‘outworn’ art carried over to the figure of the inspired ...”

“... caves and underground streams (from the ancient underworld to Coleridge’s Xanadu to Petrarch’s Fontaine de Vaucluse to Auden’s ‘The Cave of Making’) create a counterpoint to another metaphor, that of radio signals travelling ‘over dark hills and deep valleys, through troughs and ridges of atmospheric pressure’ and meeting in the image of the ...”