“... aim on passing cars and people: ‘It used to put my folks real uptight,’ he tells Herr. In Thom Jones’s ‘Break on Through’, the incredibly savage Baggit also has trouble hacking it ‘back in the World’: a few months after his return, laden with honours, he barricades himself in a beauty parlour with his mother for 14 hours before shooting her and ...”

“... the preserves of serious fiction’, is clarifying.He quotes a disparaging review by John Updike of the English translation of Abdel Rahman Munif’s Mudun al Malh, or Cities of Salt (in his own review, Ghosh called it a ‘work of immense significance’; here, as throughout the book, his shift of focus away from the West is both salutary and ...”

“... the cause had been a chorister two years younger than Byron who had been his lover at Cambridge. John Edleston (commemorated in his poetry as ‘Thyrza’) moved to London when his voice broke to take up a position as a clerk in a mercantile firm. They hadn’t seen each other for a while, when Edleston wrote to Byron, asking for help with finding a new ...”

“... five novels, is experienced as a series of reversals as unexpected as they are humiliating. James Jones, the protagonist of This Is the Life (1991), once served as a pupil barrister to celebrity QC Michael Donovan. He had thought he was in line for a position at the chambers, but was overlooked at the end of the pupillage. Donovan didn’t put his name ...”

“... themselves aloof from those with darker skin. In his 1945 novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go, Bob Jones, a black ‘leaderman’ in an LA shipyard, is at a dinner party with a group of decorous middle-class blacks who ask his opinion on how to ‘integrate the people of this ghetto into the life of the community’. ‘Well, now,’ he replies, ‘I think we ...”

“... in a Boat in the same form, will have a mild idea of the task which faced the Cambridge graduate John Smith (a sizar, married with one child) when in 1819 he was hired to decipher the six volumes of Samuel Pepys’s diary on which Magdalene College had sat for over a century. Smith did not know the system of shorthand the diarist had used, but he was a ...”

“... solid chargehand’s tread and decent low voice as he rounded the corner with his workmate, John Armitage ...’ The parody seems to invite a warm-hearted review. What is wrong with it? The serious Hoggart snaps: ‘Epithets are used for their likely effect on the reader, not to catch the nature of what is being described.’ Such books are no use, with ...”

“... not free to marry him, thereby furnishing protection from decisive action.’ Lord Byron (also on John Murray’s list) once remarked: Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife, He would have written sonnets all his life? Russell never married. He was of that company called ‘the lost generation’, as described by Jeanne Mackenzie in Children of ...”

“... was that of a professional author any purer? Although Fielding’s most enduring work, and Tom Jones (1749) especially, were the result of a painstaking commitment to the craft of writing, he always wanted to disguise the vulgarities of effort, and nowhere more than in the comedies and farces of the 1730s, eight of which appear in this volume of Thomas ...”

“... rightly thinks this to be probably apocryphal, without adding that the remark was first made by John Wilkes in the 1760s when it had more political relevance. None of the set saw active service in the 1914-18 war. They were either too old – the youngest was 32 – or too unfit, but Waldorf Astor insisted on joining the Army and was put in charge of ...”

“... one or two good anecdotes, to illustrate his points. There is the tale of Hazlitt’s fight with John Lamb, in the course of a dispute about Holbein and Vandyke. I will quote the version in Benjamin Haydon’s journal: ‘They both became so irritated, they upset the card-table, and seized each other by the throat. In the struggle that ensued, Hazlitt got a ...”

“... including me and, somewhat later, Laura Freeman, first encountered the work of Miró and David Jones, Henry Moore, Brancusi, Ben Nicholson, Alfred Wallis, Gaudier-Brzeska and others. Like Ede’s life it spans the century; but, more than that, for those of us who had not grown up in houses where there were grand pianos or interesting pebbles thoughtfully ...”

“... Register called it ‘Silly Billy’s Tomfoolery’ and dismissed its ‘indecent trash’. John Bull said that ‘the dirty abominations of the raffs of literature are far below notice,’ then devoted three issues to reviews, spoofs and comments on the book. They even got hold of one of his letters to her, and published it (thus, ironically, doing a ...”

“... John Maltby​ , the studio potter and sculptor, used to say that you can’t make a teapot about your father’s death. Grayson Perry’s whole career assumes the opposite, that you can express any amount of personal and social comment through traditional forms of craft, not just pottery but tapestry and textile design: the Tate sells a printed silk headscarf of his that wouldn’t look out of place in a county town on market day, but represents contemporary art as a sort of board game, with arrival at the Bankside holy of holies (above the cheeky caption ‘Tat Moderne’) the winner’s reward ...”

“... them as trucks bought from Marconi for filling balloons with hydrogen. David Kelly and Brian Jones were not the only ones to have doubts about the dossier: similar doubts were expressed by nuclear experts. We shall see what the Butler committee finds. Where were the bogus stories about Iraq’s supposed nuclear programme coming from? In the case of the ...”