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“... In 1962, the daughter of a friend of Dorothy Baker’s went up to her house in Terra Bella, California, to interview the 55-year-old novelist. ‘What is your real purpose in this thing?’ Baker said as the tape began to roll. The interviewer replied that the material might eventually be interesting to literary historians ...”

“... and a couple of tins of beer.’ One remembers the bag of ginger biscuits Hannay bought from a baker’s van in The Thirty-Nine Steps. But mainly it’s a sense of the past that gives this story an extra dimension and makes the Wordsworth quotation sit comfortably in place. It’s true that the main reference back is to more violence, a long-range desert ...”

“... be courting Virginia Ambella – or Katie Gough-Roberts, or Alice Pike or even, first time around, Dorothy Tennant (who later married him) – what he was unconsciously courting was rejection. In ‘Dolly’ Tennant, perhaps, he met his match, someone as sexually repressed as himself and in some respects odder, since she was, at the age of 34, still addressing ...”

“... pathetically unrealistic man, whose life was increasingly subjugated to the teachings of Mrs Baker Eddy’s Christian Science and the guiding messages which ‘the Divine Mind’ sent him at the numerous crises of his affairs. Pritchett’s mother, from still humbler origins (the Sawdons, he later recorded, didn’t have ‘an aitch to their ...”

“... story – the ‘Mayhem Parva school’ of detective fiction made famous by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. What Chabon does is to take the neat classical form – the symmetries of suspicion, the reassuring world in which wrongdoers are always discovered, and the values of Little England restored – and to split it open against the history of the ...”

“... afforded an entertainment largely absent from a rereading of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Dorothy L. Sayers maintained that the essential rules for writing detective stories are laid down by Aristotle in the Poetics. Similarly, Ronald Knox held that, from prooimion to epilogos, such stories ought to be constructed on the model of Greek tragedy. There ...”

“... she is filled with shame. Yet she keeps going back. She would have been thinking of Josephine Baker; everyone was. In the Revue Nègre on the Champs-Elysées, Baker dancing her way into French colonial fantasies, wearing a skirt of bananas. Larsen’s original title for Passing was ‘Nig’, but Knopf wasn’t ...”

“... there might have been worded more interestingly. Meanwhile Pound had married Olivia’s daughter Dorothy, after much opposition from both her parents. Besides being a woman of intelligence and sensibility, Olivia had the necessary Yeatsian qualification of occultist interests. When the poet brooded, in 1925, over ‘the woman lost’, ‘the great ...”

“... examined by two clerks from the Special Investigation Branch. Looking through the periscope, Edwin Baker, one of the clerks, saw Miss Swan’s hand posting the letter to the sanitary inspector along with a letter addressed to her sister in Woking. The stamps on both letters had been marked with invisible ink, and had been sold to Swan at the request of the ...”

“... the garage. Scholars have long known that the leading women in Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker, were based on Fitzgerald’s early girlfriend, Ginevra King, and her classmate at the Westover School in Connecticut, Edith Cummings, a noted golfer. The men in the story are not so easy to pin down, beginning with Nick Carraway, the narrator. Carraway ...”

“... the daughter of Jessica Mitford and the ex-wife of the civil rights leader James Forman, and Dorothy Zellner, a veteran of the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee. Friends from the civil rights era, and both red-diaper babies, Romilly and Zellner met Juliano in 2006 at a screening of Arna’s Children at NYU. The two women set up the Friends of ...”