“... a field’. Probably the most beautiful and attentive drawing had been done five years earlier by David Hockney, in which Auden appears wrapped up in himself and a cigarette: ‘I kept thinking,’ Hockney reportedly said afterwards, ‘if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?’ Not everyone was struck in quite that way, but everyone was ...”

“... of William Jefferson Clinton than in that of its most esteemed founding father. For whatever else may be accused of falling into decay these days, public mendacity has surely enjoyed a robust revival. The most memorable quotations from our national leaders are no longer the inspirational homilies of a Roosevelt or a Kennedy – ‘You have nothing to ...”

“... public seems more aware of. A similar moral seemed to emerge from Jake’s Thing (1978), which you may reasonably regard as Amis’s best novel if you have not yet read Stanley and the Women. Jake is conned by the Zeitgeist into thinking his middle-aged impotence a disability, and undergoes a series of humiliating public treatments for it, until he comes to ...”

“... it was part of 107 acres of pasture and gardens he bought in 1602. A minor amendment to his will may also hold a clue. It originally concluded with the formulaic phrase, ‘in witnesse whereof I have hereunto put my seale,’ but in the final version of 25 March 1616 the word ‘seale’ is crossed out and ‘hand’ is written instead. Had he recently lost ...”

“... was convincing’ (you could argue that a convincing pastiche is a contradiction in terms). Ormond may have found for the plaintiff on the grounds that Ashley couldn’t fulfil the role of a wife (‘the essential role of a woman in marriage’), but it is obvious from Corbett’s statements that this was never exactly what he had had in mind. For ...”

“... identical twins: Babies actually do get lost or separated, and, however rare such an event may be, when a person finds his twin it feeds the common fantasy that any one of us might have a clone, a doppelgänger; someone who is not only a human mirror but also an ideal companion; someone who understands me perfectly, almost perfectly, because he is ...”

“... The​ Labour Party may be the largest party after the next election, and it may even secure a majority, but it could also do very badly. These alternatives show Labour’s decline since the first couple of years of the coalition, when a Labour victory in 2015 was (more or less) confidently predicted ...”

“... that are more than metaphors, are not likely to go away.Literature is full of examples, which may be especially instructive when they don’t concern literal ghosts. ‘It is impossible to lay the ghost of a fact,’ Marlow says in Lord Jim, a little before Stephen Dedalus starts his discussion in a Dublin library – only four years before, if we think ...”

“... the beginning of the century, and Dora Carrington might have had the good luck to stay ordinary. David Garnett, introducing his selection of letters, felt that the reader might ask: ‘Who was this woman Carrington?’ She derived her importance from the fact that she lived with Lytton Strachey. Hostesses, he went on, like the Asquiths and Lady Colefax, who ...”

“... for New Times’ – a general political statement or programme – and a fable for the 1990s by David Edgar. The book is long, and since several contributors are responsible for more than one essay, there is a good deal of repetition. Tighter editorial control would have done no harm, though that might have been construed as inhibiting the openness of the ...”

“... Enright accepts that great art is ‘amoral, unleashing energies which do not stop short of, which may even seek out, gratuitous ferocities’. Davie’s criticisms are of course reflected everywhere in Enright’s poetry itself, most obviously in its anxieties about the impotence of the liberal humanist. In ‘A Liberal Lost’, from The Old Adam ...”

“... another socialist doctor, Leslie Haden Guest, who later became a Labour MP. Her second husband, David Eder, also a doctor, ‘was one of the first English medical men to fall under the influence of Freud’ and to disseminate his ideas. A Zionist of the mild kind, he envisaged a Jewish State as part of the British Empire. The Eders’ house was ‘a meeting ...”

“... provide. The signs now are of a swing back to a different, more literal translation of the Bible. David Rosenberg’s The Book of J (1990) reads very differently from things like the Good News Bible or the Revised English Bible: The man named his wife Hava: she would have all who live, smooth the way, mother.     Now Yahweh made clothes from skins of ...”

“... people’ to pass. Even if you find the apartment, you might not find Blam: he may have slipped out along the narrow walkway that crosses the roof, above ‘the abyss’ of Main Square. On the other hand, ‘if there were a search warrant out for him’ the mansard’s seclusion would ‘turn it into a trap’. If cornered he’d ...”

“... purged. Even in the Hollywood years, some indelible poshocracy remained. On making friends with David Hockney, in LA in the 1960s, Isherwood enthusiastically exclaimed: ‘Oh David, we’ve so much in common; we love California, we love American boys, and we’re from the North of England!’ Parker adds: ‘As Hockney ...”