“... Unlike Viv Albertine, the former Slits guitarist and the author, so far, of two marvellously frank memoirs, she’s not an especially wild or gifted raconteuse. She hit the big time in the 1970s and has never been remotely precious about her stories, which means she’s told most of them loads of times already, most notably in Lester Bangs’s Blondie ...”

“... homosexuality was, if not quite in the open, certainly accepted. Hambleton’s regulars included Charles Scott Moncrieff, who introduced Coward to Oscar Wilde’s lover Robbie Ross, through whom he met Siegfried Sassoon. But Coward wasn’t a bohemian or part of any set that could even retrospectively be seen as countercultural. He absorbed many of the ...”

“... and Claud was sent to school at Berkhamstead. The headmaster during the First World War was Charles Greene, father of Graham and a high-minded radical, and Cockburn first saw political violence on Armistice Day, when a drunken mob burst into the school accusing Greene (quite wrongly) of having been ‘anti-war’. But the experiences that followed were ...”

“... Kipling studies, Harry Ricketts, who, like Mrs Bathurst herself, lives and works in New Zealand. Charles Allen, whose great-grandfather brought the 16-year-old Kipling out to Lahore to work on the Civil and Military Gazette, has made a good selection of the Indian stories, including one or two previously uncollected ones, and reminds us in his introduction ...”

“... in the Fifties when Stan Cullis’s Wolverhampton Wanderers adopted the ideas of a Wing-Commander Charles Reep. Reep had invented a theory called POMO, or Point of Maximum Opportunity, which involved getting the ball to the aforesaid point as soon as possible: the long-ball game, in short. He worked out a formula which would guarantee a team promotion: S ...”

“... misanthropy, Inadmissible Evidence, or for that matter, Alpha Beta by Ted Whitehead, Veterans by Charles Wood, The Arbour by Andrea Dunbar, or Caryl Churchill’s plays directed by Max Stafford-Clark, or the plays of Christopher Hampton, Joe Orton, David Hare, Howard Brenton, Athol Fugard or Sam Shepard. The tradition of unmannered acting, devotion to the ...”

“... from the forgers themselves, are the press barons and their editors: Henry Nannen, Rupert Murdoch, Frank Giles and Charles Douglas-Home. That Trevor-Roper should have ‘taken the bona fides of the editor’ – of Stern – ‘as a datum’ passes belief. Probably he has never read the ...”

“... Letter C’; it reappears in Chapter Nine, entirely concerned with American poetry and comparing Frank O’Hara with Ed Dorn (not the expected names? No, thank heaven); and in Chapter 11, where three English poets who normally trade in pathos are applauded for at one point departing into anti-pathos – Ted Hughes in Crow, Geoffrey Hill in Mercian Hymns and ...”

“... a volume written as an exercise in academic sociology. This was Art Students Observed (1973), by Charles Madge and Barbara Weinberger, part of Faber’s Society Today and Tomorrow series. The authors’ research was funded by the Social Science Research Council. One suspects that Madge took the leading role in the book, not only because of seniority but ...”

“... it was (and is) a wonderful grandstand. The land feels eager to be eroded all over New Zealand. Charles Andrew Cotton, a local pioneer of geomorphology could illustrate most generalities of what erosion does to landforms with native examples. All my New Zealand years I lived at 13 Pitt Street with my parents and sisters. (As you walk down, the odd numbers ...”

“... and the cosmopolitanism of a great seaport. Previous literary exiles had included Stendhal, Charles Lever and Richard Burton. In addition, Trieste had its own literary world: Futurism flourished there, Marinetti visited frequently and contributed to local papers, and Joyce’s pupil and friend Ettore Schmitz would later – encouraged by his teacher ...”

“... 1685 the Duke of York, who had been brought up in exile as a Roman Catholic, succeeded his brother Charles II as king and became ex officio head of the Church of England. On any view this was going to be a problem, and James II as he now was, egged on by his theological advisers, made the worst of it. Among other unwise moves he declared the Test Acts, which ...”

“... short story collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You (2007), was well received and won the Frank O’Connor Award. Like her films, these stories are filled with oddballs, many of whom have sexual kinks. In ‘The Moves’, a dying man offers his daughter an unconventional parting gift: strategies for pleasuring women. (‘He said he didn’t know if ...”

“... mate. Mandelson had stayed with her while his Notting Hill base was redesigned. Her husband, Sir Charles Powell, was Margaret Thatcher’s foreign policy adviser. One of Powell’s brothers, Jonathan, is Tony Blair’s chief of staff; a second, Chris, manages the Labour advertising account. Mandelson is friends with Tory MPs; Prince ...”

“... description of Hensleigh’s other sons as ‘listless layabouts’. Even Hensleigh Wedgwood and Charles Darwin, who at least had high intelligence to recommend them, suffered the ‘Wedgwood-Darwin cult of unhealth’ in a mild form, but they could not compete with the real experts in the family. Henrietta Darwin was ‘always going away to rest, in case ...”