“... Krays are referred to in his books), by the great anti-pornography campaign or by the advent of Harold Pinter into the fold. The book ends in the mid-Sixties, just as the author, in full literary flight, has completed that excellent life of Wellington. Page one introduces us to the author’s jolly orange-haired nurse, once of the music halls, doing the ...”

“... though he undoubtedly resented her. The nearest he came was to say, no, he didn’t get his love of history from her, for in truth he got little from her at all. Even less did he criticise his father, for all that he saw a different woman on his arm each time he met him: Jack gave his father the unswerving deference Joe Kennedy assumed as his right from ...”

“... at like one: ‘Write to me soon,’ she wrote before he set off for America, ‘and tell me you love your little Page, and that one day you will come back to “him”, my Prince, my Prince.’ ‘Why can’t you dress up as a boy and come with me?’ wrote Douglas in reply. Better than that, even, was the fact that George Montagu, an old (possibly ...”

“... growth has been awakening to charity, using the name, rather than the fashionable all-purpose ‘love’, to denote that Pauline virtue of loving-kindness to the naturally repellent, the lame, the maimed, the halt and the blind. There are other interpretations of moral growth. Early in Bratton’s period, in the typical fictional tracts manufactured for the ...”

“... and re-order, just as Kathy Acker had appropriated and re-ordered the writing of others – Harold Robbins or Cervantes or Ian Fleming or Propertius. Recently, on the radio, Leslie Dick remarked that Kathy Acker’s writing was an extension of her reading, that her plagiarism was a way of reading, or rereading, appropriating and customising what she ...”

“... her, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot praised her work, Aleister Crowley exploited it. In the Twenties Harold Acton came across her in Paris, not exactly among ‘the bevies of truculent women’ who surrounded Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford but somewhere near. On the fringe of the Montparnasse bars were a few talented storytellers running to seed, like poor ...”

“... fast running out of money. His wife, Edith, who is with him in the Middle East, fell instantly in love with the fervour of his ambition on the evening they met, but has since become disillusioned with him. She believes that a woman’s role – because it is the role she desires – is to provide feminine support to a strong man, and her husband is falling ...”

“... in the 1980s. They hold their own with more famous photos, taken on and around the Beat scene by Harold Chapman, Fred McDarrah and John Cohen. The photographer Robert Frank is in another league; a dozen prints from The Americans, first published in Paris in 1958 with texts by Beauvoir, Steinbeck, Faulkner and others, hang alongside the Kerouac ms. Frank’s ...”

“... for granted.Taking political liberties himself, Powell chose to betray his own party and plot with Harold Wilson to defeat Edward Heath. I visited Pentonville Prison in December, on a tour to mark the jail’s 175th anniversary. No phones, no laptops – instant isolation and unease. Pentonville was considered a model new prison when it was built in the 1840s ...”

“... In the days of heady fame – of Broadway and the Royal Court, of pursuit by the press, of ‘love-nests’ and ‘hideaways’ and CND celebrity rallies – the letters still wing their way. ‘Sid is upstairs in Bed. He had all his bottom teeth out on Wednesday.’ How did our hero escape Nellie Beatrice, Sid and the rest? He had a footling journalist ...”

“... Here is a Russian at the improvisers’ prize-giving: ‘I get phases like tonight when I’d love to fuck almost every woman I see. Look at that magnificent, fat, blowsy frau dancing with the Pole. God, I’d love to get it up her and stifle myself between her breasts!’ Here is another Russian, visiting ...”

“... quasi-idylls are from the story of his own life, with its debts and shady business deals, dubious love-affairs, caricatural dandyisms, scroungings for patronage, early and obscure breakdowns, humiliations endured and revenges taken; its unbounded audacity and calculated displays of aggression; its ever-vigilant opportunism and its ...”

“... pedigree of Namier’s ideas, however. When at Balliol between 1908 and 1911 he fell in love with the stolid, pragmatic instincts of the British governing class and the empire over which it ruled, despite the antisemitism which prevailed in both. In 1910 he changed his surname from Bernstein to Namier, and in 1913 became a British subject. But ...”

“... may explain both the weakness of his books and their remarkable and continuing popularity. Readers love an amateur with no intellectual pretensions – one of themselves, in fact – who is also an expert craftsman: and Waugh’s novels are as solidly made as the best furniture. Among his most genuinely enthusiastic recollections was the ‘brilliant and ...”

“... most of her fictions, which tend to be elaborate and circuitous meditations on deeply felt themes: love, ambition, anti-semitism, or the difficulty of maintaining a Jewish identity in a gentile society. ‘It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.’ This, from Henry James, is one of Ozick’s favourite quotations. In her case, it is ...”