“... in the same year, leans forward on a rail, whip in hand. She shares the picture with a chained fox – a ‘bagman’, the catalogue suggests, released to give the hunt sport when foxes were not to be found. There is no flutter of drapery here. James and Mary Shuttleworth were painted with one of their daughters. Mrs ...”

“... for that When you read a lot of Rich you see repeated motifs: places and people on fire; a wild fox, alluring and unconstrained; a boat she has to pilot, a marsh or sandbank or peninsula she has to leave. All these figures come back in Tonight, a book as explicit as late Yeats or late Heaney in its return to the poet’s prior work. There are also recurring ...”

“... slide into dotage, unsparingly described by Malcolm Muggeridge and Evelyn Waugh (‘Smell like fox’). He died in his Sussex home in 1953. Belloc was sometimes taxed with being the author of W.N. Ewer’s much anthologised squib: ‘How odd/Of God/To choose/The Jews.’ As a young man he had maintained Dreyfus guilty against all the evidence to the ...”

“... the asexual tax monk who might actually be happy, who sits across the table from the ultra-fox Meredith Rand and levitates listening to her talk about her time on a psychiatric ward and her prettiness. And there are multiple David Wallaces. One David Wallace, wet behind the ears, with so notable a skin condition that he has catalogued the different ...”

“... her family travelled to Europe so that her father, Sol, a contract violinist for Twentieth Century Fox (he delivered the stabs and screeches in Psycho), could pursue some musicological research. Babitz wrote a Daisy Miller-inspired novel, which Heller sent to his publisher: it was turned down. Deciding to be a groupie instead, she raced through the LA art and ...”

“... us. By an accident of the publishing season, Tennant’s morsel of national whimsy coincides with James Michener’s brick-sized The Covenant. At 873 pages (costing a mere £7.95 – compare Alice fell’s 124 for £5.50), this can claim to be the only Great American South African novel. Michener’s work belongs to the currently best-selling genre of the ...”

“... To his children he was demonstrative and tender, indulging them as he himself had been indulged at Fox How, the Arnold family home in the Lakes. From the start, he was exasperating. Even the awful presence of the great Doctor could not make him grind away at his studies, whether at private school, at Winchester, where he spent a year, at Rugby, where he did ...”

“... squarely at an audience conceived as wanting its close readings of ‘Pike’ and ‘The Thought-Fox’ leavened by details of Hughes’s ‘vigorous’ love-making, and likely to be impressed by pseudo-profound sentences such as ‘Hughes’s poetry was the history of his own soul,’ or would-be moving ones, such as the eight-word paragraph with which Bate ...”

“... the formal end of what was erroneously called the ‘First British Empire’, and the fall of the Fox-North coalition over the regulation of the East India Company. It goes on to span an era in which, in Hilton’s words, ‘Britain’s military and diplomatic prestige touched a pitch it has never reached before or since,’ and in which its ...”

“... themselves great by ignoring this advice. The best of them – Maxwell Perkins, Robert Giroux, Joe Fox, Bennett Cerf – allowed many brilliant young things to roll about on their front lawns, and some days they even took a drink in the company of these writers, or let their dogs loose to lick their fidgety, callused hands. A sad business, this little ...”

“... some other series. One never sees hunger or anger in Hamm’s eyes, only the misery of the hunted fox. Either he is playing the hero as a schlub in deference to a 21st-century idea of masculinity as fundamentally hollow and sham, or he’s completely underequipped to convey male menace. The most necessary thing that he can’t do is to justify viscerally why ...”

“... was and remains a perilous marvel that entities as ambitious and reckless as Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Fox, Netflix and Facebook could and can tap such springs of money and – in what was at first a cash business – that no one much bothers whether it’s legal or accounted for. Or remembers that art needs to be done for its own sake. The audience made it clear ...”

“... role’, but with a new despondency. He enlists the assistance of other artists, from Dante to James Joyce, and yearns guiltily for the ‘clumps’ and ‘clunks’ and ‘clogs’ of his most youthful verses. Not so guiltily, though, that he cannot welcome some jeering Joycean advice: ‘Keep at a tangent. When they make the circle wide, it’s time to ...”

“... panic occurred’. Berlin mentions this, jokily and in passing, in several letters, but Alice James, the wife of William James’s son Billy, gets the full story of the disaster that didn’t happen, at least to Berlin. ‘I saw a thin flame crawling up the side of my window & decided that it would take at least ten ...”

“... government buying 50,000 for distribution to the armed forces. The movie version by 20th Century Fox reduced the American continent to tears, and trembling fingers all over the US pinned Norman Rockwell’s painting of Jennifer Jones as Bernadette to their walls. Werfel was born into a prosperous Jewish family in Prague, then still in the Habsburg Empire. As ...”