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“... A makeshift bed was set up on the terrace overlooking San Giovanni, with its statues of Christ and John the Baptist. A frozen winter light hung over the church and wisps of mist blew off the statues. I lay on the bed wrapped in my raincoat and tried to sleep. The rooftop had a high wire-mesh fence round it to prevent patients from jumping off. (In November ...”

“... so that the frontier was now seen as a gateway to world power and economic abundance. (John F. Kennedy’s reference to a ‘new frontier’ in his speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president in 1960 carried this implication.) The myth of a West dominated by small family farms (Jefferson’s vision of the future) had already given way ...”

“... are William Gaskill’s superb revivals of The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux Stratagem, John Dexter’s A Woman Killed With Kindness, Coward’s Hay Fever, Stoppard’s Jumpers, Clifford Williams’s all-male As you like it, and Olivier’s own productions of Three Sisters and Juno and the Paycock. All of those, I’m sure, were Tynan’s ...”

“... unable to see it. In ‘The Handsome Lady’ the widowed Caroline tells the unhappily married John that ‘if there is love between you there is faithfulness, if there is no love there is no fidelity,’ but he’s too slow to take the hint or too worried there would be gossip, and by the time his wife dies the widow is already dead. And in ‘The ...”

“... San was chiefly the work of the Dutch, and some British historians have accepted this view, but John Philip, a hawk-eyed missionary in the 1820s, knew that this wasn’t so. The system ‘which rendered the Dutch name so infamous’, he wrote, is now being carried on ‘in all its horrors’ under the British Government: ‘Impatient to obtain undisturbed ...”

“... and did not make much fuss when southerners referred to the whole island as ‘England’. Sir John Seeley wrote his prophecy of a global imperial destiny in 1883 under the title The Expansion of England. For generations, the fact of England’s numerical predominance in the UK was veiled by the image of the island English as the heroic founding ...”

“... Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude. They are not simply suckers and/or closet racists ...”

“... diaries, which Tynan bequeathed on his deathbed to his daughter Tracy. They have been edited by John Lahr, the perfect choice for the task – indeed, an inescapable one. Lahr is Tynan’s true successor at the New Yorker, reviewing theatre for the magazine, as did Tynan, and, more important, filling his loafers as its premier celebrity profile writer, its ...”

“... scholarship and creative writing: disciplines which differ in their points of reference (Samuel Richardson v. Jhumpa Lahiri), the graduate degrees they award (Doctor of Philosophy v. Master of Fine Arts) and their perceived objects of study (‘literature’ v. ‘fiction’). Mark McGurl’s The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative ...”

“... to the ‘kitchen sink’ allegedly installed somewhere in the house. Novels by Stan Barstow, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey and others framed stories told from the point of view of an aspiring and/or truculent working-class protagonist, often Northern, usually but not always male, as a Bildungsroman or novel of moral and sentimental ...”

“... doubleness ministers to social vigilance, not to solitary complacency. In The Figure of Echo, John Hollander has recently unfolded a contrariety in Chapter 26 of the Book of Proverbs: Answer not a tool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit. Each of these ...”

“... their own being, if they would only look. The message about work resembles the one discussed in John McVeagh’s memorable article on ‘Defoe and the Romance of Trade’ – that there is a glory in trade. ‘Challenging, lucrative’, trade ‘is also wonderful’, and Defoe’s admiration for it ‘is not the dull astonishment of the outsider. It is the ...”

“... Meanwhile Valerie had become a star of stage and screen. In one film she played opposite Ralph Richardson, whom she much liked, and Laurence Olivier, whom she did not, finding him selfish, offhand and cold. He was however preferable to Leslie Howard, who with his girlfriend for a time shared a house with the Havelock-Allans. Valerie’s best-known films ...”

“... her life. Dogville is structured in chapters, like Breaking the Waves, but also has a narrator (John Hurt) who supplies a mocking commentary on the town and its hypocrisies. Grace is found by an aspiring young writer called Tom (Paul Bettany), who is engaged in an inquiry into Moral Rearmament. Tom believes that the people of Dogville have no sense of ...”

“... when it first came out, the few minutes that I see the scene in which Durrance, played by Ralph Richardson, loses his pith helmet as he’s climbing a cliff in the desert. The helmet bounces away down onto the sand leaving him exposed to the burning sun, which sends him blind. One other scene stands out. The hero, Harry Faversham (...”