Lee explained to her that art for art’s sake is an upper-class aesthetic. To create art divorced from any purpose, you can’t be living a life driven by need and desire.

The easy joy and the joyful ease of sex with men, their easy-access genitalia, their uncomplicated inner lives…

When the past is hard to explain, it’s best to concentrate on the future.

Peggy spent most of her time upstairs in the playroom, keeping him cleaned and fed. She was made to bring out the baby and accept praise for her work as if she were a being of a slightly lower social class – which she was. A woman.

He informed Byrdie that his social engineering ambitions betrayed all the delusions of grandeur that you might expect from the son of a poet.

The library, like the thrift shop, specialised in the leavings of the elderly dead.