“... short of students. ‘They will starve me out,’ he said, ‘they’ being probably not only his ex-friends at Emmanuel but F.L. Lucas, especially detested for being at King’s and associated with Bloomsbury, and E.M.W. Tillyard of Jesus, an inveterate and skilful enemy. So his life was often a series of fights, under ...”

“... be huge. Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, phoned him early to report: ‘It’s happening.’ Jason Miller, his senior election adviser, tweeted: ‘It’s happening.’ By 10 p.m. Trump was convinced he had triumphed, with plenty to spare. At 10.30 he took a call from Karl Rove, former election guru to George W. Bush, congratulating him on his win. This sealed ...”

“... Frederica hosts is called Through the Looking-Glass, and its pilot episode features Jonathan Miller and Richard Gregory talking animatedly about mirrors and doubles, both of which figure prominently in A Whistling Woman’s own symbolic repertoire. (As she did in Babel Tower, where she brought on Anthony Burgess as a witness for the defence in her ...”

“... 1940s – may begin by telling you the names of ‘the great English novelists’ (Austen, Eliot, James, Conrad), but the opening chapter then takes us through the failings of those who came before them. Defoe ‘matters little as an influence’. Fielding existed to make Austen possible, but if you feel her ‘distinction’ you will also feel that ‘life ...”

“... characters got a tick if they were on the side of liberty (Cromwell, Chatham), a cross (Charles I, James II) if they held up the march of progress. Because he went in for active royalty and made some attempt to govern on his own account rather than leaving it to the Whig aristocracy, George III had been written up as a villain and a clumsy tyrant. This view ...”

“... her, it seems, without a biddyish dilation on the carnality of her themes. ‘Maude Hutchins,’ James Kelly wrote in 1955, does ‘as she pleases’ as a novelist and ‘to date what has pleased her most is s-e-x as observed and enjoyed from the feminine vantage point.’ Hutchins, Maxwell Geismar said, was a writer who ...”

“... Reveille with Beverly is a now largely forgotten 1943 film starring Ann Miller and the great Franklin Pangborn. Worked up from an equally forgotten US radio series it’s a corny but percipient tale about a spunky young DJ who’s hep to the vital Swing rhythm the kids all dig, and the stuffy station owner who wants no part of her indecorous jive ...”

“... ambitions: Pacino’s audition piece was ‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!’Alfredo James Pacino was a lonely child, and to keep himself company he used to act out scenes from films he’d seen with his mother. As a five-year-old, his ‘routine’ was to impersonate Ray Milland as an alcoholic in the 1945 noir The Lost Weekend. He was ...”

“... has led them to propagate a demoralised, sometimes seriously mistaken view of our culture. James Handley, Henry Grey Graham and even T.C. Smout are shown to have assumed a sort of inherent backwardness, a ‘centuries-old sleep in levels of civilisation (housing, farming, politics, behaviour) from which we were awakened by the 1707 Union to a sudden ...”

“... begin his 1980 Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered in 1964. The American Century details J. Edgar Hoover’s personal and the FBI’s institutional linking of white supremacist and anti-Communist hysterias, to which America’s national police ...”

“... In For whom the bell tolls, which he wrote when he was about forty, he represents the 52-year-old El Sordo as an old man wondering why the prospect of death is unattractive even at his great age. At the time Hemingway still had his most remarkable antics to come, during the Second World War, but by the time he reached ...”

“... a doodlebug.In a spin-off novella based on the series – the first of twelve such books by Hugh Miller – Dr Legg, the GP who in the first episode will tend to both the pregnant Pauline and the comatose Reg, is married to a young nurse who is killed by an unexploded bomb in the garden of their newly bought home. Dr Legg, whose last appearance in the series ...”

“... reality than the author could bear. ‘It has become a critical commonplace,’ Linda Patterson Miller writes in her foreword to the present volume, ‘that his wounding as an American Red Cross ambulance driver in World War One scarred him psychologically and led him to create emotionally damaged heroes attempting to live in a troubled world through the ...”

“... by the gaggle of extreme Brexiters in Parliament to her freedom to manoeuvre in the forthcoming EU negotiations.Yet Corbyn is strong enough, on a good day, to deliver a speech like the one with which he launched Labour’s campaign:Much of the media and establishment are saying that this election is a foregone conclusion. They think there are rules in ...”

“... A senior State Department official was sandwiched into a corner at the top of the stairs. James O’Keefe, the founder of the far-right activist group Project Veritas, was the DJ.Downstairs, a conservative law clerk was introducing himself to Stewart Rhodes as a fellow Yale Law School grad. They compared notes on different professors. The law clerk ...”