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“... in the fragmentary memoir called ‘Sex’, written in the Locked Diary but sadly excluded by Philip Gardner, ‘My instinct has never given me true information about sex’; ‘not till I was 30 did I know exactly how male and female joined’ – that is to say, when he was writing Howards End, with its extramarital pregnancy that ‘deeply ...”

“... of Harrison’s subversive, utterly anti-Whiggish suggestion, drawing on recent research by Dr Philip Gardner, that the working-class private-venture schools of the mid-19th century, the notorious ‘dame schools’ denounced by middle-class reformers, were better institutions (if we take the common person’s point of view as our standard of ...”

“... about – in the parlance of creative writing schools – what they “know”.’ She quotes John Gardner saying that ‘great writers tell the truth exactly – and get it right.’ But, she says, ‘for the modern British – more to the point, English – novelist, this notion of truth is a little obscured and inaccessible.’ Historical novels and ...”

“... friends with Geoffrey Keynes. In Oxford, and although he came down with a mere Second, Helen Gardner urged him to do a B.Litt. and write a dissertation on Yeats’s manuscripts. Stallworthy had no interest in writing a dissertation; he stayed on for a fourth year in Oxford only to try for a Blue. (My jealousy is out of control.) ...”

“... is as much an expression of his taste and enthusiasm as of those of its doyenne, Isabella Stewart Gardner. He was not exaggerating when he told his 50th Harvard class reunion that most of the Italian pictures of any merit that had come to America between 1895 and 1940 had had his ‘visa stamped on their passport’. His protégés and epigones remain ...”

“... combed the cobwebs from our hair: the starship arrival of Blake Bailey’s authorised biography of Philip Roth, Philip Roth: The Biography. The ‘the’ of the subtitle said: accept no substitutes. Another biography of Roth was in the offing, Ira Nadel’s Philip Roth: A Counterlife, a ...”

“... noir, so I came to Bogart (as to Cagney, Raft, Edward G., Stanwyck, Hayworth, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Gloria Grahame) retrospectively and as a ready-made – I think I need to use the word – icon. They were vast beings moving across the screen, on prints patinated with the time that had passed. The women were beautiful in a glamorously dated way, but ...”

“... and Life magazine not only brings Bruegel into the scene, it shows a picture of Sinatra with Ava Gardner. All this stuff has fallen indelibly into the past, but DeLillo retrieves it by the sheer energy and movement of his prose, and his shifts of angle, and by threading into the story of the game – the Giants are losing, it seems they cannot win, they win ...”

“... Melvyn Douglas, Deanna Durbin, Melvyn Frank, Daniel Fuchs, Henry Fonda, John Garfield, Ava Gardner, Judy Garland, Henry Hathaway, Van Heflin, Fritz Lang, Burt Lancaster, Audie Murphy, Burgess Meredith, Groucho Marx, Vincente Minnelli, Gregory Peck, Vincent Price, Robert Ryan, Edward G. Robinson, Donna Reed, Nicholas Ray, Robert Siodmak, Frank ...”

“... often jeering response. Only a few answered the insults in kind: Empson’s correspondence with Philip Hobsbaum, who was his pupil but disagreed with some of the basic tenets, is full of rude words and anger on both sides. In this case the insults were part of what Empson called ‘my long attempt to improve the mind of Hobsbaum’, and Hobsbaum, defying ...”

“... Brennan moved from hotel to hotel. She was ‘like the Big Blonde in the Dorothy Parker story’, Gardner Botsford wrote: she could ‘transport her entire household, all her possessions, and her cats – in a taxi’. Searching for an area in which to ‘settle down’, she tried Hudson Street, 22nd Street near Ninth Avenue, Sullivan Street, Ninth Street ...”