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“... the Five Spot was to free jazz of the bop conventions it had settled into. Coleman loved Charlie Parker’s music – he wrote a tune called ‘Bird Food’3 and could mimic Parker brilliantly – but, as he put it in the liner notes to Change of the Century, he felt that ‘the idolisation of Bird … has finally come to ...”

“... to the rector of a fashionable Mayfair parish, blends the hypochondria of Sanditon’s Diana Parker with the injudicious high living of Dr Grant in Mansfield Park. ‘Bertha’s health,’ says her husband Randolph regretfully, ‘wouldn’t have stood any district but W1 or SW1. Anything near the Harrow Road, or the canal, or Kensal Green cemetery had ...”

“... with more detailed contextualising narratives and a wider cast of tragic characters (Dorothy Parker, who was blacklisted in Hollywood; H.L. Mencken, who came under suspicion for his German background during both wars; John O’Hara, whose many failures included a job application to the fledgling CIA). The book’s editors, JPat Brown, B.C.D. Lipton and ...”

“... their tics, the way they inhabit their clothes. In her film of Twombly, intimately called Edwin Parker after his given names, her hero moves about his studio in Lexington, Virginia, inspecting sculptures and correspondence, eating lunch at a local restaurant, assisted by a mini-entourage of helpers. At one point, he fishes in the pocket of his tweed jacket ...”

“... to surround her with women who really did make their careers on their own: Rebecca West, Dorothy Parker, Natalie Barney and Zelda’s Montgomery classmate and friend Sara Haardt, who fled belle-dom to write fiction; the serious and tubercular Sara eventually married H.L. Mencken and died shortly afterwards. These women were more or less kind to Zelda ...”

“... when he was 18, Robert Lowell and two friends from St Mark’s School – Blair Clark and Frank Parker – rented a house in Nantucket. Under Lowell’s direction, they studied the Bible (with special attention to the Book of Job) and ate cereal with raw honey and ‘badly’ cooked eels. Lowell decided that Clark should quit smoking and, when Clark ...”

“... account of the country house as lost arcadia. Lawrence and Baldwin both feature as guests of Philip Sassoon, although Baldwin – he was anxious to make the point – was not present when Sassoon was entertaining ‘ladies with painted toenails’. All the while, beside the new fast set, the old slow set kept up tradition, moving at a stately pace with ...”

“... to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust,’ a waiting femme fatale says when Philip Marlowe hits his office in The Big Sleep (1939). Marlowe’s response: ‘Who’s he?’ ‘A French writer,’ she says, ‘a connoisseur in degenerates. You wouldn’t know him.’ She couldn’t have said the same to Philo Vance, S.S. Van Dine’s ...”

“... mother who had more to do with forming the taste and character of the man Joe became. Elizabeth Parker Mitchell, called Betty, was the first on either side of the family to earn a college degree (Southern Presbyterian in Red Springs, North Carolina) and she wanted her children to feel they were part of the larger world. She subscribed to dozens of magazines ...”

“... his own and suspect version of it, but he always turned against the end-product and its author. Philip Purser, for instance (‘Nosy Parker’ in Edward’s usual post-publication demonology), tried hard, in his short but entertaining The Extraordinary Worlds of Edward James (1978), to achieve detachment, but there is ...”

“... and Eliot were up to. It seems odd that Stallworthy has kept his distance. Maybe he agrees with Philip Larkin that the Modernism of Pound and Eliot, like the paintings of Picasso and the jazz of Charlie Parker, was a regrettable diversion from the main issue. In English poetry, the main issue was Hardy, in Larkin’s ...”

“... Party in 1937, an unforeseen problem arose, and she found herself having to call a friend Mr Parker because she wasn’t sure whether to go on saying ‘Rafe’ or ‘if, like other middle-class comrades, he’d changed his pronunciation (to “Ralph”) to suit the Party’. This was the merry world of Cyril Connolly’s ‘Where Engels fears to ...”

“... well-plotted light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my voice had broken at long last and this was the first male role ...”

“... His correspondent, John Hohnsbeen, an art-dealer friend, was having an affair with the architect Philip Johnson, and the ‘unprivate walls’ are those of Johnson’s famous Glass House. Schuyler was 28 and this was his first serious mental breakdown. He had only recently arrived in New York after an extended stay in Italy, where he worked for a time as ...”

“... mummy, it was hilarious,’ he has William say about a television show. ‘They had a photo of Mrs Parker-Bowles and a horse’s head and asked what the difference was. The answer was that there isn’t any.’ Morgan adds: ‘Diana absolutely exploded with laughter.’ Everybody at the royal wedding was watching everybody else to such an extent that the ...”