“... made up). These changes make (some of) his poems more accessible and ostensibly more frank: he now writes plainly about being gay. But these may not be profound differences. The radical problem for Merrill was the trickiness of self-representation. In the early part of his career, he simply froze before the lyric ‘I’. What enabled him, later ...”

“... soul-stripping illness whose details Bayley did not spare. After her death in 1999 things sped up. Peter Conradi’s portly authorised biography was smartly challenged by A.N. Wilson’s slimmer unauthorised memoir, Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her, a witty, affectionate, impious account which made disturbing suggestions about Bayley’s feelings towards his ...”

“... of Duddy Kravitz. Moses Berger, drunk, attends the opening night of a dramatised Diary of Anne Frank in London. He dozes off and wakes during the poignant Hanukkah scene. Suddenly there was a crash from below the attic. The Green Police? The Gestapo? Everybody onstage froze. Straining to hear. For a few seconds there was total silence and then something ...”

“... exploit the fears of all sections of society who suffer from Conservative attempts to demolish it. Peter Shore displays the greatest awareness of such an approach when he writes what is a remarkably frank eulogy of both Labour and Conservative governments after 1945. Gerald Kaufman, who, incidentally, is going to restore ...”

“... rapport between actors that animates such classics of the genre as It Happened One Night (Frank Capra was Cassavetes’s favourite director) or The Awful Truth or Bringing Up Baby. Part of the fun of those movies comes from the sense they give that the actors themselves are having fun. An actor having fun with a part, playfully embroidering it, opens ...”

“... real world and an ideal alternative. Both Jack Zipes’s The Wounded Storyteller and Peter Wortsman’s ‘The Golden Pot’ and Other Tales of the Uncanny include translations of ‘The Sandman’, Hoffmann’s most famous text. ‘The Sandman’, the ur-text on the Doppelgänger, has been the object of a dizzying number of readings, among them ...”

“... sensitivity of his own circle and the military’s unthinking bravery came to mind when reading Peter Hart’s book. Hart tells the story of the Egyptian and Sudanese campaigns – Egypt in 1882, Sudan in 1883-85 and 1896-98 – through the eyewitness accounts left by soldiers and journalists, with the aim of uncovering how they were experienced and ...”

“... which is awaiting it upon the cinema screen. Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black and William Peter Blatty’s Legion (‘The sequel to The Exorcist’) very neatly illustrate this parting of the ways. If Susan Hill’s ‘ghost story’ is not a pastiche, it is undoubtedly an essay in recreating the almost exhausted genre. We are back in that indefinable ...”

“... written a lively, serviceable biography, but Chandler’s personal torments were made public in Frank McShane’s posthumously ‘authorised’ biography of 1975, and Hiney offers fundamentally the same account. The only child of an American father and an Anglo-Irish mother, Raymond Chandler was raised in England after his father abandoned the family. He ...”

“... allowed to marry in the South of France, with both mothers in attendance. The early sections of Peter Sussman’s Decca, a vast collection of Mitford’s letters, cover this period. For those who take pleasure in the ironies of epistolary communication (or non-communication), there are some gems here. One is the clever forgery, written by Mitford and ...”

“... a dozen biographies of Brando, or memoirs that depend on his presence. The weightiest of these is Peter Manso’s, published in 1994, when Brando still had ten years to live. (Mann hurries through those last years out of kindness as much as weariness. The killing of Drollet, the imprisonment of Christian and Cheyenne’s subsequent suicide left Brando a ...”

“... field of interest is that of immunological surveillance, as popularised by the writing of Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, an idea so clarifying that almost everyone in the business wants it to be valid. The idea can be said to grow out of a consideration of the teleology of the process by which foreign (that is, ‘non-self’) organ tissue grafts are ...”

“... been no difficulty in showing that, in these memoirs as in her career, Thatcher has been neither frank nor humble. Mrs Thatcher appears to suffer from a quite advanced form of egomania, or megalomania, or both; and it is genuinely difficult for her not to see everyone else as either her opponent or an instrument of her will. The former are immediately ...”

“... Charter 88 and the Institute for Public Policy Research are promoting the two in harness, as Peter Pulzer explained in the last number of the London Review. Liberty (the NCCL) and polemicists such as Keith Ewing and Ronald Dworkin have confined their attention to a Bill of Rights alone. But the yoking of the two is not accidental. It reflects the cast of ...”

“... party’s general secretary, persuaded him to write for the Daily Worker under the pen-name Frank Pitcairn for £4 a week – supposedly the wage of a semi-skilled worker. His first contribution was a long, superbly angry report on the Gresford colliery disaster of 1934, blaming the mine-owner’s negligence for the deaths of 266 men. Cockburn wasn’t ...”