“... with its dialectical wiles, will find the worm of ideology at work in every apple; it is, as Frank O’Hara wrote in his poem ‘The Critic’, the assassin of orchards. But here are two books, both theoretically acute and both marvels of close reading, that argue the case from apparently different sides of the ideological fence, yet which permanently ...”

“... there like Queen Mary’ was to indicate that a terminal blight had been cast over the occasion. James Pope-Hennessy, born in 1916, belonged to that generation. He came from a distinguished Catholic and literary family and was a friend of many of his most interesting contemporaries, Cecil Beaton and James Lees-Milne among ...”

“... That the English have been slow to recognise James Merrill as the best poet in the language after Elizabeth Bishop has long seemed strange to Americans. Come to think of it, British recognition of Bishop herself was belated; for decades she was upstaged by Robert Lowell, probably because he lived in England and behaved in a way that seemed more certifiably poetic ...”

“... He is 28 years old when he comes to London from the US (a little younger than his beloved Henry James) and meets the love of his life, a unique Greek called Nikos Stangos. The boys were fascinated by Bloomsbury – the books, the people, the scarves, the gossip – which led them to venerate Stephen Spender as one of its last links. Squeezed into a narrow ...”

“... was arrested the next day in Birmingham. The five were taken to Morecambe police station where Dr Frank Skuse, a Home Office forensic scientist, tested their hands for evidence of contact with explosives. Meanwhile a posse of detectives from the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad headed up the motorway to interview the suspects. In Morecambe Skuse conducted a ...”

“... minor art, yet there is no one quite like him – no one alive or male, anyway. ‘He is proof,’ Frank Kermode has argued, ‘that an older tradition could survive the importunities of the modernist Twenties and stay modern, respond finely to the world as it is.’ I am not sure how true this is, or in what ways it might turn out to be true: but it is ...”

“... enormously to Gable’s individuality, but plays havoc for ever after with the moment when he’s frank with Vivian Leigh. You could argue that our tendency to demand when as soon as we think if has been responsible for the development of civilisation, and I daresay there are those who admire the first hominid who looked at a rock and saw a tool in it, but ...”

“... same suspicions. During the 1929 Parliament Lee was romantically interested not in Bevan but in Frank Wise, an ILP MP twenty years older than her, and married with four children. They became known as a couple at Westminster and were ‘passionately attached’, Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary, adding that ‘the scenes in the House of Commons when the ...”

“... a literary Rolodex on the page. Along with Auden, there are mentions of Shelley, Larkin, Forster, James and others. Sullivan’s handling of them has a curious effect. They’re neither looming nor vital. Like statues in the park, they’re just there. The looser second section of the poem consists of dissolve after dissolve in which being ‘half aware’ is ...”

“... corrupt professors at UCLA, owns a cell line derived from tissues taken from an ex-marine called Frank Burnet. Burnet’s cells are potentially valuable because they’re abnormally good at producing cytokines, proteins with anti-carcinogenic properties. Burnet is trying to sue UCLA for removing his tissues under false pretences and exploiting them for ...”

“... what sticks in the mind from Banks’s first novel is the surprise ending in which the hero, Frank, discovers himself not, as he tormentedly imagined, a castrated boy, but a hormonally interfered-with girl. Cure ensues. The revelation is handled skilfully by Banks, so as to create maximum consternation in the reader. The transsexual dénouement has been ...”

“... landscapes of Rubens (including their bovine staffage, which no one else has had any use for) was James Ward. The Tate exhibition of Ward’s Gordale Scar with the whole range of studies and drawings for that picture (unluckily, too close to megalomania to be taken seriously as the masterpiece which, as a painterly performance, it undoubtedly was) revealed ...”

“... several unpublished novels: the incomplete ‘Who Else Is Rank?’, written in 1944-45 with E. Frank Coles, a fellow officer in the Army Signals Corps; ‘The Legacy’, written in 1948-49, and ‘rejected by, I think, 14 publishers’ (its protagonist is ‘Kingsley Amis’, like the character ‘Martin Amis’ in Money); or the unfinished ‘Difficulties ...”

“... Mae Morse doing ‘Cow Cow Boogie’, and, in his Hollywood debut, a slender young reed called Frank Sinatra. Even at the time, Sinatra’s cameo didn’t cause much of a stir, and Reveille doesn’t feature in many official filmographies; but it did mark, in its modest way, the inception of Sinatra’s solo career. He had just left the Tommy Dorsey ...”

“... nor have I ever met a woman to whom I have been romantically drawn because she resembled Anne Frank, or whom I mentally transformed into Anne Frank and endowed with her status in order to try to clear myself of Jewish charges of self-hatred and anti-semitism.Though some readers may have trouble disentangling my life ...”