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“... the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ‘Quite the best revue I’ve seen for some time. Bernard Levin’, the point being that whatever the notices this could go up at the front of house.27 January. A woman writes to me saying that having read a piece I’d ...”

“... a government pension, he wrote: ‘I depend upon myself and do the best I can, which is bad.’ As Peter Whitmer puts it in The Inner Elvis (1996), ‘there was a history to the emptiness that flawed Vernon’s character and created the subsequent psychological hole in Elvis’s personality. Both the lack of and the need for a father figure seemed to be a ...”

“... hope to that saving possibility and not hold out against the occupying forces. His biographer, Peter Dodge, traces all the tortuous visions and revisions that led up to this ultimate misjudgment. He sees Hendrik de Man as a tragic figure, forced into exile (and convicted of treason in his absence), not so much through opportunism, compromise or worse, as ...”

“... of the left have continued to up the ante. Judd Apatow: ‘Trump is a Nazi. The debate is over.’ Peter Fonda: ‘We should rip Barron Trump from his mother’s arms and put him in a cage with paedophiles.’ Advisers to the president and members of his cabinet have been mobbed and jeered, denied service in restaurants, and harassed at home; and more such ...”

“... useful supplement to A Moveable Feast, qualifying the nasty portraits therein of Ford and Wyndham Lewis and explaining how it was that Hemingway acquired quite a reputation as a writer without actually publishing anything. Here, too, began his career as a bully. If it’s true that perfect strangers occasionally went up to him and hit him it can only be ...”

“... parallel tradition of para-literary works, from Carroll to Conan Doyle to Stoker to Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling, Pullman. There’s no other body of literature quite like it: just consider the comparative absence of fantasy from the French and Russian traditions. And yet it’s perfectly normal for widely literate general readers to admit that they read no ...”

“... the school in Dulwich that her father attended. Although not an amateur like Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey or Allingham’s Albert Campion, Inspector Alleyn is quietly well-connected, a younger son who went to Eton and Oxford and then entered the diplomatic service, but left because he couldn’t stick the terms of the Paris Peace Conference; his concern ...”

“... conventional and somewhat anorakish one: I hoped to locate the grave of my great-uncle, Rifleman Lewis Newton Braddock, 1st/17th (County of London) Battalion (Poplar and Stepney Rifles), the London Regiment, who had died in the war and was buried near Amiens. Facts about him are scarce. My grandmother, whose only brother he was, has been dead now for twenty ...”

“... more to say in favour of the ‘proletarian’ novels of Walter Greenwood, Walter Brierley and Lewis Jones etc. At most, it helped him to be more appreciative of the ‘bourgeois’ Edward Upward’s trilogy ‘The Spiral Ascent’ and to make out a convincing case – one I would certainly go along with – for the greatness of Auden’s ‘Spain’, a ...”

“... The small rain down can rain? Christ that my love were in my arms And I in my bed again. C.S. Lewis used to say that it was his wife he was thinking of, not his mistress or girlfriend, otherwise he would most likely have written ‘in her bed again’. However that may be, the point is that de la Mare and Stevie Smith and Anon are all appealing to us over ...”

“... than practice, with the result that his 18th century looks rather different from that presented by Lewis Namier and his historical school. Though Knights is conscious of the varying circumstances and pressures faced by particular generations, he is less interested in these than in the range of views that periodically emerged, and in the persistence of ...”

“... an ideal and a reality, as Greville and Sidney well knew, the distance may be large. When C.S. Lewis, in the Oxford History of English Literature, called Sidney ‘that rare thing, the aristocrat in whom the aristocratic ideal is really embodied’, he provided unwitting testimony to the success of Greville’s legend. It is only recently that the gap ...”

“... we normalised this inherently exploitative behaviour.’In​ the postwar period, landlords from Peter Rachman – whose name became a byword for racketeering and exploitation in the 1950s – to Rigsby in the 1970s sitcom Rising Damp, were seen in the popular cultural imagination as mean, unscrupulous and cowardly. By the time Thatcher came to power in ...”

“... the beloved ‘best companion’ to whom she dedicated The Song of the Lark; the second with Edith Lewis, a fellow spinster from Nebraska with whom she lived in New York from 1913 to her death – we know next to nothing. The elusive Duse, one feels, would have approved. The same preference for austerity informs Acocella’s view of Cather and her ...”