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“... 60th birthday in 1948 contained much pleasant anecdote, and there were respectful reminiscences in Allen Tate’s memorial volume of 1966. Meanwhile, off the page, there was some gossip about such matters as a putatively vast pornographic poem, and about Eliot’s first marriage. I once heard J.B. Priestley explaining that the Eumenides in The Family Reunion ...”

“... When Southern boy Elvis first went north to do some fancy New York TV, the usually quite hep Steve Allen miscalculated badly and showcased him in a dreary, patronising skit in which Elvis has to deliver his song to an actual slobbery hound dog. You can feel the Northern condescension and snobbery thick like molasses in the studio air. For his second TV ...”

“... by learning to box, by falling in love with a boy he referred to as ‘Dick’ (actually called George Harcourt Vanden-Bempde-Johnstone, later 3rd Baron Derwent), and by joining a poetry society run by some charismatic masters. He said in his autobiography, Goodbye to All That, written in 1929 when he was only 34, that by the end of his time at Charterhouse ...”

“... Maugham is Of Human Bondage. It’s easy to see why post-1918 adolescents – including George Orwell – thrilled as the scales fell from the eyes of Philip Carey, the club-footed but otherwise Maugham-like student hero: It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are ...”

“... about touch football in Central Park, had been nominated for an Oscar. (It played with Woody Allen’s Bananas at New York’s Baronet Theatre to brisk business.) In a giddy moment, we’d even taken out one of those bow-wow fuck-off ads in Variety thanking ‘the Industry’ for our nomination. My trajectory seemed as straight and clear as the plane’s ...”

“... his period, left a lasting manifesto of critical method. He was no provincial, admiring Goethe and George Eliot along with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. But most of what he wrote on literary matters he left unpublished, and his range was essentially French. As a critic, he is remembered today principally for his dismissal of Sainte-Beuve’s aberration in talking ...”

“... morning I might revisit an early story like ‘Flight’ (1959), which sees the Updike stand-in Allen Dow referred to by his father as ‘Young America’, and musing that ‘his mother’s genius was to give the people closest to her mythic immensity. I was the phoenix.’ I would see Updike himself bristling gold with fire and feathers, and I would admire ...”

“... sense of ‘formality under duress’ which Hill once attributed admiringly to the American poet Allen Tate. ‘With what concentration, effort, agony he must have laboured on these marvellous poems!’ Michael Wharton exclaimed in a review in the Spectator, praise which was prominently reprinted on the jacket of the 1985 Collected Poems to sum up a whole ...”

“... they had ‘two different Blakes’. McClure spoke of it in an interview with Jerry Aronson: ‘Allen has a Blake who is a Blake of prophesy, a Blake who speaks out against the dark satanic mills. My Blake is a Blake of body and of vision. Blake was such a powerful, such a great being that it’s possible for every one of us to have an entirely different ...”

“... and had high hopes of political advancement, but these came crashing down when in 1916 Lloyd George’s coalition offered his father a peerage to reward his philanthropy and his newspapers’ longstanding support of the Conservative cause. Waldorf was furious when his father accepted, because he would have to succeed him as the second Baron Astor, which ...”

“... to Synge to Christian neo-medievalism and the study of ancient Greece. The English scholar George Thomson reading Aeschylus on the Blasket Islands might seem an outlier in Irish Studies, but late Deane was as quick as young Deane to sense possibilities.The previously unpublished essay ‘Emergency Aesthetics’ argues that the distortions of legality ...”

“... Some, like the Ukip farming spokesman, Stuart Agnew, and the Conservative farming minister, George Eustice, insist that, post-Brexit, domestic subsidies would continue to flow, and may even increase. Yet the official campaign, Vote Leave, has made clear that it’s ready to sacrifice farmers to contrive a bonus from Brexit for the country as a ...”

“... but again faced no punishment, prompting the resignation of the author of the report, Sir Alex Allen, the independent adviser on ministers’ interests. It was revealed that Johnson had refurbished the prime minister’s Downing Street flat with £112,000 provided by Tory donors, but Lord Geidt, Allen’s ...”

“... also stayed the longest: a thickset, sandy-faced man with heavy tortoiseshell spectacles, called Allen, who had a strong temper, which was known to erupt in the early hours of the morning after my father had kept him waiting at the wheel outside a hotel, or on holidays abroad, when crossing some high Alpine pass between one Central European spa and ...”

“... management do give us more time to suffer the pains and debilities of old age but, as Woody Allen noted, consider the alternative. Still, Porter is on to something important here and the tension between his two narratives – the Exodus narrative of liberation from ignorance and disease, the other its ironic doppelgänger – suffuses his book. The ...”