“... Beasts in interest. The volume has a valuable seventy-page introduction and some useful notes by John Haffenden, who arranges the material as far as possible in chronological order. The play or melodrama, Three Stories, was written when the poet was 20, and performed, with him in the cast, by the Cambridge ADC. Long supposed to have been lost as Empson ...”

“... knitted yellow stockings, he was always quick-witted, a story-teller, an enchanter. Introducing King George VI to the Snowdon skyline, he pointed to the peak of Cnicht, remarking, ‘That bit there, Your Majesty, is my own’; then, recalling his prior duty to the idea of a Snowdonia National Park, quickly added: ‘but keep it under your Crown.’ Jonah ...”

“... ship was put back on an even keel. Curiously, although the Grosart debacle, fully documented in John Bicknell’s edition of Stephen’s letters, is briefly mentioned in Alan Bell’s exemplary entry on Stephen in the ODNB, these misdemeanours make no appearance in Arthur Sherbo’s entry on Grosart. Thereafter, the DNB maintained its announced schedule ...”

“... lures the animal inside. In the library, as the bear dozes beside her, she picks up an edition of John Richardson’s Wacousta (1832), often called the first Canadian novel, and then reaches for the next book on the shelf: an 1858 memoir by Edward John Trelawny who ‘burned Shelley’s body and saved the heart’, who ...”

“... back, cow-eyed and alabaster-browed. The actual text is 1079 tiny-printed pages long. ‘Who is John Galt?’ the novel begins: the question is rhetorical, an expression of despair. The setting is, loosely, America in the 1940s – Washington, Wisconsin, Mexico are mentioned, as are diners, bums, hamburgers, negligees – but film-set-thin and vague and ...”

“... off Bonnie and Clyde – went to see him in The Indian Wants the Bronx in which he appeared with John Cazale, who would play Fredo in The Godfather. The first performances of The Indian Wants the Bronx were in a venue so tiny that the audience had to walk across the stage to reach the exit. But then it moved to a venue off Broadway, which is where Dunaway ...”

“... Except I fancy Clark swung his arms more slowly than Healey, this putting him in a slightly King of the Apes mode.10 September. Catch part of the revamped Round Britain Quiz, none of the contestants a patch on the team of Eric Korn and Irene Thomas with their personalised and often over-informative answers. There is a question on the trivium, the ...”

“... to marry them. In Lichfield, the geographical centre of Middle England, a statue of Captain Edward John Smith of the Titanic stands in a park bestowing dangerous blessings on newly-wed couples emerging from the nearby register office. In McKie’s version of England the past is generally not allowed to assert itself as a moral yardstick, a measure of decline ...”

“... seen Cabaret, listened to Kraftwerk, read Thames and Hudson paperbacks on the Bauhaus as well as John Willett and Ralph Mannheim’s punkish translations of Brecht, attended repertory screenings of Metropolis and M and put Louise Brooks posters on bedroom walls. Fassbinder’s real obsession was with the 1950s, and with West Germany’s US-bankrolled ...”

“... appreciated.He did not think much of the Irish. ‘Apart from the fact,’ he wrote to his friend John Hayward, ‘that the Irish have a certain respect for poetry and religion, theirs is a tiring society; and the kind of war nerves they are suffering from – not really daring to make up their minds what they think, and not being really prepared for anything ...”

“... like the whiff of cordite long after the gun has been fired. When I mention this to David Cornwell/John le Carré, he says: ‘I can still feel it in my nostrils now.’ Historians, like spooks, need a sensitive nose, Orwell’s ‘Sniff, sniff’ for the detection of ‘all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls’.3 (And, in ...”

“... does not treat the actual life of Welles or its salient circumstances: his collaborations with John Houseman and Joseph Cotten and Michéal Mac Liammóir; his affairs with Dolores Del Rio and Lena Horne, and his marriage to Rita Hayworth; complicated relationships, usually rounded up to some sort of friendship, with the great producers of the day who used ...”

“... in this volume was altered substantially, the differences are slight. The annotation supplied by John Woolford, Daniel Karlin and Joseph Phelan is, as always with a Longman edition, very full: it is especially detailed about the Brownings’ life together. It is good to see Donne’s influence on Browning being fully traced (Donne was not much read in this ...”

“... the ‘French luxury titan’), the ‘serial dater of supermodels’, and the ‘leveraged-buyout king’. The book is illustrated with photographs of de Pury’s friends, such as Tita Thyssen-Bornemisza (wearing a ‘100+ carat diamond’), Al Taubman and Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis. De Pury was private curator to Baron ‘Heini’ – Hans Heinrich ...”

“... and bypassing civil service rules on appointments. (Coincidentally, her husband, the Tory MP John Penrose, is Johnson’s official ‘anti-corruption champion’.) The National Institute for Health Protection is a very Johnsonian creation: combining NHS Test and Trace with Public Health England, it was designed by the management consulting firm McKinsey ...”