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“... Claire Bloom has now written two books about her life. Lest this give rise to any suspicion of autobiographical surfeit, she notes in the Preface to the latest volume, that her earlier book, Lime-light and After, constituted merely ‘a modest account’ of her acting career, whereas the new work presents a more thoughtful self-portrait of Bloom, the female ...”

“... offstage.Until, that is, the publicised (tabloidised) dissolution of his marriage to the actress Claire Bloom and the parting kick of her memoir Leaving a Doll’s House (1996), which set a million squinty eyes on him, judging, condemning – how dare this broody brute browbeat Lady Marchmain so? The guilty verdict, a public condemnation based only on ...”

“... Mr Ferris actually gives us a list of people who wouldn’t talk about his hero: these include Claire Bloom, Alexander Cohen, Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, Sir John Gielgud, Hugh Griffiths, Joseph Losey, James Mason, Vincente Minnelli, Mike Nichols, Rachel Roberts, Daphne Rye, Jean Simmons, and three of his wives, Sybil Christopher, Elizabeth ...”

“... a quintuple heart bypass followed by a nervous breakdown – and then there was his split up with Claire Bloom (and Bloom’s subsequent exposure of the ‘facts’ about their marriage). At times, it must have felt like old times. Remember, post-Portnoy, that ‘affair’ with Barbra Streisand, whom Roth had never ...”

“... visited London, where I’d begun spending a part of my time, they’d come to have dinner with Claire Bloom and me. Though Bern and I ended up most evenings talking together about books and writing, we hardly ever alluded to each other’s fiction and never seriously discussed it, observing a discreet, unwritten rule of propriety that exists among ...”

“... than films because of his verbal precision; Raymond Carver appears at Bill Buford’s for dinner; Claire Bloom has a passing and unjustified role). If there’s an excuse for the name-dropping, it’s Kureishi’s belief that a writer must have an intelligent and involved audience, something his father never had. ‘One thing you do need in order to ...”

“... prose can’t do it. I suspect we shall enjoy this story much more when it turns up on BBC2 with Claire Bloom or Judi Dench. If this review were a lifeboat, Benson and Williams would be sweating: A.S. Byatt is about to get in it. There really wouldn’t be room for them. Possession is a big book, a spectacular novel of ideas and intrigue, spectacular ...”

“... of brave tots with funny accents and white ankle-socks might melt American hearts? The actress Claire Bloom, who went to the States at the age of ten, describes in her autobiography how she was sent out to raise money for war relief by singing a nauseating little ditty: I’m a little English girl Knocking at your door. Driven from my home By the ...”

“... since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.’ Roth and Claire Bloom weren’t actually married at this point but were a supremely well-known couple. According to her 1996 memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House, Roth had kept uncharacteristically quiet about the book on which he was working, though she knew its ...”

“... scenes. When he takes the story on to Switzerland, where Byron reluctantly resumed his affair with Claire Clairmont, and first met Shelley, he still seems to get the people and the personal relations right. But at this half-way point the limitations of gossip are also beginning to show. Byron didn’t live all his life in bed, and was in fact entering on his ...”

“... of Power in Javanese Culture’, published in 1972 in Culture and Politics in Indonesia, edited by Claire Holt. The essay had an unlikely origin. One day, as I was sitting in my office with the door open, two senior professors walked by, chatting loudly on their way to lunch. The man doing most of the talking was Allan ...”

“... quotations from Mansfield’s letters and diaries tend to be all over the place too. The title of Claire Harman’s biography, All Sorts of Lives, points to the volatility of her subject and the difficulty of her task. But at least some facts are incontrovertible. The Beauchamps had five children who survived infancy; Kathleen was in the middle. Her father ...”

“... was a child who died. Ackroyd has no new evidence and we await the publication in November of Claire Tomalin’s biography of Ternan. In the meantime Ackroyd interprets the known facts in a strikingly new way. He contradicts the Wright-derived view of a long-resisted quasi-rape of a disgusted Ellen by a slavering Dickens. He equally contradicts Kaplan’s ...”

“... the routes of liturgical processions. In London there were many cells along the old city walls. As Claire Dowding has noted, they formed a ‘ring of prayer’ encircling the capital. Life as an anchoress began with a death. On entering their cell for the first time, the recludensus (novice recluse) would climb into a grave dug inside the cell. The enclosure ...”

“... we know that Freud’s a ‘strong poet’ and that, swerve and dribble as we may with Harold Bloom, we can’t escape his influence. Anyway, the goal posts are contingent, and an irritable reaching after fact and reason, like Gellner’s, is doomed from the start. Thus Leo Bersani shuns ‘verification’ and finds in late Freud a discourse which conveys ...”