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“... idea of nationality, even so complex an argument as that presented by Laurence Lustgarten and Ian Leigh in In from the Cold, is bound to fail. They take nationality for granted, and deny the possibility of loyalty to a free market in ideas. ‘The market’s purported virtue is precisely its impersonality,’ they write: ‘it is inconceivable that ...”

“... with an answering machine. Grylls was hooked at once. He recommended the legendary lobbyist Ian Greer, who was approached by the hoaxers and, like Grylls, immediately hoodwinked. Lured to the bogus Park Lane offices Greer and his associates were filmed as they boasted about their powerful contacts in the Tory Party and the Government. Greer even ...”

“... and gets a bit of help on the side from our hero, a ruminative, world-weary ex-spy called Humphrey Leigh. But as a straight suspense tale, it doesn’t begin, or seem to want to, work. For example, it is clear to us a few pages after the murder that the ‘random thug’ theory can be discounted: there are no fingerprints, the killer knew the layout of the ...”

“... Charlotte a self-esteemer. Her example was easier to follow, much more influential. When Aurora Leigh was published in 1857, reviewers pointed out a striking resemblance to much in the plot of Jane Eyre. Romney Leigh, her cousin, whom the half-English half-Italian Aurora eventually marries, is blinded in a fire like Mr ...”

“... already everywhere, but no one knew it. It’s the greatest cover-up in human history, to quote Ian McKellen quoting Dan Brown. During the Cannes screening of the film critics are said to have laughed when a crowd of bewigged ghosts shows up for Newton’s funeral in Westminster Abbey, forcing the live characters to elbow their way through the shades to ...”

“... the painter Arshile Gorky, with whom she had a turbulent marriage until his suicide in 1948. Joan Leigh Fermor, a former secretary to Osbert Lancaster, was the wife of Patrick Leigh Fermor, famous at that time for his activities during the war, including the controversial kidnapping of the German commander on Crete. The ...”

“... in a wicker chair, checking a page in his typewriter. The picture appears on the covers both of Ian Hamilton’s Writers in Hollywood and of Tom Dardis’s Some Time in the Sun and instantly announces several elements of a familiar legend. Even in black and white the image is full of warm shadows, and the uncropped version fills out the legend a little ...”

“... whole. His major precursors are Quiller-Couch, Yeats, Auden, George MacBeth, Christopher Ricks and Ian Fletcher. I don’t intend a Shopper’s Guide, but I’ll start with two small complaints. Unlike Fletcher, Karlin doesn’t give explanatory notes, except for a few dialect words and phrases in foreign languages. Reading Davidson’s ‘Thirty Bob a ...”

“... statement that, after their star-crossed Romeo and Juliet on Broadway in 1940, Olivier and Vivien Leigh went to lick their wounds for a month in Vermont with ‘the Alexander Woollcotts’. The English period equivalent would be a month in the country with the Beverley Nicholses. Holden is sometimes forgetful, evacuating the wartime Old Vic in one chapter to ...”

“... savouring of the land – the ‘landscape’ – must overlap with more workmanlike uses of it. Ian Thompson’s history of the Lake District is grounded almost exclusively in the aesthetic. ‘Since the Lake District is an imaginative construction,’ he argues, ‘it has no real boundaries, physical or historical.’ So he is thinking of it as a region ...”

“... too (‘peeping their horns out at today, like snails’), as are places like his home-town, Leigh-on-Sea (‘Snail-towns’). If you’re not a snail in his estimation, you’re probably a robot. He writes of a colleague: ‘This girl represents a sort of splendid physical machine one wants to set in motion.’ He hates ‘the ...”

“... Wilson (whom he once used to trump the BBC’s religious broadcasting department in a turf war), Ian Fleming and John Osborne. The bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockwood, surrounded by Arab boys, camp churchmen and Beverley Nichols, takes the credit for widening Betjeman’s horizons, leading him and Elizabeth Cavendish regularly abroad in a group that Osbert ...”

“... had marched during the miners’ strike of 1984. As a local writer and arts administrator called Ian Clayton observed, with some prescience, two years earlier: ‘What would Fev be without rugby, or Cas or Leigh or anywhere? Small grey towns that had their day, that were born from coal and died with it, like so many in the ...”

“... his company’s image as non-racist, pro-African and hostile to the illegal Rhodesian regime of Ian Smith. He lit upon Duncan Sandys, a slow-witted, racist, pro-Rhodesian right-wing Tory MP, described by another director as ‘bent ever since he was a lower boy at Eton’. Sandys was interested in chairing Lonrho for one reason only: the remuneration. He ...”

“... Forces’ Minister. These include a directorship with the security firm Saladin Holdings. Edward Leigh was junior minister with responsibility for technology until he was removed by the Prime Minister. Since then he has amassed consultancies with Pinnacle Insurance, Inter-tanko and the mining group, the National Association of Licensed Opencast Operators, as ...”