“... In June​ , Philip Hammond, in his last few weeks as chancellor of the Exchequer, wrote to the candidates vying to succeed Theresa May as leader of the Conservative Party and asked them to pledge that, if elected, they would retain his target of bringing down national debt as a percentage of GDP. ‘If we do not commit to getting our debt down after a nine-year run of uninterrupted economic growth,’ he demanded, ‘how can we demonstrate a dividing line between the fiscal responsibility of our party and the reckless promises of John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn?’ Four years ago in these pages I warned that the government’s plans to bring down the headline debt figure through asset sales, including the sale of part of the student loan book, would mean a loss of millions of pounds to the Treasury (LRB, 5 March 2015 ...”

“... Suffering pain, writer’s block, and the rage of critics, Philip Roth’s hero Zuckerman resolves to quit writing fiction and go to medical school. ‘Who quarrels with an obstetrician?’ he reasons: He catches what comes out and everybody loves him. When the baby appears they don’t start shouting: ‘You call that a baby!’ No, whatever he hands them, they take it home ...”

“... Only a few months after the first, revelatory, biography of Philip Larkin there come two new lives – whether they are ‘revelatory’ will need pondering – of Michel Foucault. It is a suggestive coincidence. The one an exemplar of humanism, the other a grand exponent of anti-humanism, they are about the best in the way of writers their two countries have lately produced, and at their death they seemed to leave as great a hole ...”

“... the symbolism that Yeats got from the French poets, especially Mallarmé. In her essay ‘Philip Larkin: After Symbolism’ Barbara Everett has pointed out these French, echoes: the fact that, for example, ‘Sympathy in White Major’ is a kind of symbolist parody of Gautier’s ‘Symphonie en Blanc Majeur’, and ‘Arrivals, Departures’ echoes ...”

“... up by later writers of unquestioned Science Fiction, as if by some mysterious affinity. Even her short story, ‘The Transformation’, which Aldiss mentions, seems to have come to life again in Tim Powers’s award-winning The Anubis Gates of 1985, a book which turns on the concept of exchanging souls, and ends with an amazing scene of Samuel Coleridge ...”

“... Bacon was profoundly aware that a project on this scale needed time and that life was short. ‘I wax now somewhat ancient,’ he fretted, ‘one and thirty years is a great deal of sand in the hour-glass.’ But the lure of political advancement was too great. As the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Elizabeth I’s second most important adviser, and ...”

“... both showed a certain ambivalence when it came to meeting in person: reunions were postponed at short notice, transatlantic trips delayed month after month until years had gone by. Instead, Greene becomes a kind of Manhattan Scheherazade, telling stories of nights with Sarah Bernhardt and dinners with her band of ‘octogenarian lovers’, fancy-dress balls ...”

“... who in a single month, June 1789, discovered not only the papers of the theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe, on which most of our knowledge of the working practices of the Elizabethan theatre is based, but the records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels from 1622 to 1642, a complementary treasure-trove on Jacobean and Caroline court ...”

“... Banned in Cheltenham’. But it was an expensive production at a shilling an issue, and short-lived. It would never have attracted such national attention (other papers also covered its launch, though with less of a sense of imminent danger than the Mail) if the leading spirit among the rebels had not been Esmond Romilly, the nephew by marriage ...”

“... When John le Carré published A Perfect Spy in 1986, Philip Roth, then spending a lot of time in London, called it ‘the best English novel since the war’. Not being such a fan of A Perfect Spy, I’ve occasionally wondered what Roth’s generous blurb says about the postwar English novel. As a le Carré bore, however, I’ve also wondered how Roth managed to overlook Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), the central novel in le Carré’s career, in which George Smiley – an outwardly diffident ex-spook with a strenuously unfaithful wife and an interest in 17th-century German literature – comes out of retirement to identify the turncoat in a secret service that’s explicitly presented as a metaphorical ‘vision of the British establishment at play ...”

“... it, an engraved card that read JULIAN MORROW. I stood there for a moment and then I knocked, three short raps. A minute or so passed, and another, and then the white door opened just a crack. A face looked out at me. Thus the narrator becomes the reader, and we share an ecstasy of wide-eyedness. Repeatedly, the novel returns to this function: as I was climbing ...”

“... is an opinion of Belloc’s vouched for, it seems, by two of his grandsons, Julian Jebb and Dom Philip Jebb OSB. Nothing about Belloc can be stranger to us today than the depth of his anti-semitism. He was a man who delighted in his own extravagances and inconsistencies, but there was commonly a hint of burlesque in his parading them, and that he was found ...”

“... Compared to boring old Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, we think, had a short life and a gay one. When not writing his sonorous verse, he was spying, preaching atheism, fighting and getting murdered. Park Honan has done one of the two already, and now has done the other. Coming shortly after David Riggs’s solid, even too-solid The World of Christopher Marlowe, his Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy feels a little lightweight ...”

“... works by Michelangelo, Col-eridge, Hogg, Stevenson, Kafka, Jean Rhys and numerous others. It is a short book, but dense. Warner’s highly complex line of argument, winding around so much material, and so tightly, produces a compacted, even crabbed architecture. You feel like you’ve stepped inside a miniaturised cathedral. The movement of the first chapter ...”

“... group which operated out of the mountains in Tajikistan and northern districts of Afghanistan, was short-lived. There were a number of incursions into Kyrgyzstan in 1999 and 2000, but several hundred of its members were killed fighting alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11. While the Taliban were able to relaunch their movement a few years later, the ...”