“... manor house, home of the Horners. Opposite the church door is Munnings’s equestrian statue of Edward Horner, its Lutyens plinth like a smaller Cenotaph, though how the dates compare I’m not sure. But it’s only the most striking of First War mementoes in a church that is virtually a shrine: nearby is the white-painted wooden cross erected on Horner’s ...”

“... of the difference between a ‘life of purity’, such as he found exemplified by the poet David Jones when visiting him in a Harrow lodging-house with Stephen Spender, and the ‘many lives of pastiche’. But he is aware of the origin of his woes. From 4 October 1953: ‘My deepest problem. I have changed families and at a terrible cost substituted my ...”

“... Beardsley told Smithers that the Peacock should ‘untiringly and unflinchingly attack the Burne-Jones and Morrisian medieval business’. Beardsley was committed to ‘usurpation’: he was determined to use the work of his elders and betters in his own manner, cleverly transporting it into a new and original style of his own – to outdo Morris at being ...”

“... white settlers from Rhodesia or Kenya could keep their ‘unfettered’ right of entry.Claudia Jones, the Trinidadian activist who founded Britain’s first major black newspaper, the West Indian Gazette, called the 1962 act a ‘colour-bar’ law which imposed ‘second-class citizenship … at a time when apartheid and racialism is under attack ...”

“... The Inklings, though, was the best club, and superseded all others. It was founded in Oxford by Edward Lean, the younger brother of the film director David Lean, and was dedicated to the reading and discussion of creative work in progress. When Lean graduated, Lewis took it over. The group was for men only. (Dorothy L. Sayers, a keen Christian and an ...”

“... finished) – he was evading the censorship to produce satirical allegories about the regime of Edward Gierek, who had taken over the leadership of Poland in December 1970. The broad theme was the futility of all attempts at economic ‘development’ without political reform. But Domosławski’s book shows that the allusions were often much more ...”

“... Scots. M. calls later and recalls how someone he knew picked up Bowie when he was still David Jones. He offered to come round, bringing his guitar as he wanted to try out some songs. They had sex and then he wanted to play, only his host pleaded another appointment and sent him away. How long after this it was that Bowie had his breakthrough I’m not ...”

“... other factor in my favour is that, compared to most other guys, I have nothing to lose.He nurses a jones for the agency’s older, married female boss. When his moment finally comes – her bare legs stretched before him on the coffee table – she says: ‘Take me – or your Christmas bonus.’ It’s a hilarious Jack Benny ‘Your money or your ...”

“... Stones. There is a certain amount of minor-key keening around the ‘mysterious’ death of Brian Jones, but that story circulates very much as a cautionary tale rather than an airy fable, all too humanly squalid, with nothing mythic or fantastical about it. (Even a lowlife encyclopedist like myself emerges from any time spent reading about ...”

“... his desire to pose as the champion of blue-collar workers and his obsessive interest in the Dow Jones index, which doesn’t react well to his economic nationalism. While Trumpian rhetoric emphasises the dignity of labour, even economists inclined to favour protectionism have struggled to find any substantial group of American workers that has benefited ...”

“... acting on the stage’ in the description of the political contacts-man and Astor consigliere Tom Jones, using words of the sort that later stuck like labels to Waldorf’s son David wherever he went. Waldorf’s wife, whom he met on an Atlantic crossing, was the opposite. Variously compared to a gnat, a grasshopper and a Chinese cracker, Nancy Langhorne was ...”

“... with the Sixties spirit, and the most active and persuasive union leaders were leftist, like Jack Jones (transport workers), Hugh Scanlon (engineers) and Clive Jenkins (white-collar workers). – Industrial militancy was on the increase. Benn had been aware of the looming crisis on the Clyde, a product of purblind management’s refusal to modernise: in ...”

“... address themselves. There is some overlap here with the first part of Political Shakespeare (PS), whose editors contribute the concluding essays of the Methuen volume. Their main concern is with the social and institutional context of Shakespeare’s plays, both in his own age and in modern Britain. Marxism is here the dominant intellectual ...”

“... was a wellknown amateur singer; a stately woman who had been painted by Sargent, had been one of Edward VII’s mistresses and appears to have had the archetypal Edwardian capacity to carry on liaisons without upsetting the seemly surface of her life. At 58, however, she often felt ‘seedy’ and the 35-year-old Hall impatient and restless. In May 1916 ...”

“... Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, a law and order manifesto for a very nasty party. If Tom Jones had encountered this Fielding in his rambles round Britain, a longish novel would have become a short story. Tom’s sexual transgressions were matters for the ecclesiastical courts, but he was a poacher, an idler unwilling to earn his living by regular ...”