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“... run into Clayhanger, and (Wells again) The History of Mr Polly; perhaps the Antipodean outsider Henry Handel Richardson would have scooped it with The Getting of Wisdom. In 1924 Forster’s publishers might have thought they had a chance with his block-buster, A Passage to India. For once, Wells wasn’t dogging him: but there was Maurice Baring’s ...”

“... will be concerned with the children of Raven’s repertory characters – Peter Morrison MP, Tom Llewyllyn, the journalist turned don, and even the hideously disfigured homosexual, Fielding Gray. The sins of the parents may well be visited upon these children. The more faithful of Simon Raven’s readers will look back at his earlier saga to remind ...”

“... and the World Bank were eclipsed. The head of the third bank, the Bank of America, a man called Tom Clausen, lurks in the background. Since he has now taken over from Robert McNamara as chief of the World Bank, he would almost certainly have taken a more prominent role in Sampson’s book but for one thing: he was the only top banker who could not find time ...”

“... have happened like that, I suppose, but it does sound rather like a mixture of Walter Mitty and Tom Brown’s Schooldays. There is the tone here of a conceited man who thinks himself just as good a writer as the famous man he is writing about – and also much more manly, worldly and socially acceptable. It is, in fact, precisely the tone of Trelawney’s ...”

“... it might not otherwise have roused. Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll (the murdered man). Sir John Henry (‘Jock’) Delves Broughton (the presumed murderer). Diana, Broughton’s second wife, who was later to become successively the wife of Gilbert de Préville Colvile and of Tom, the fourth Baron Delamere. Gwladys, Lady ...”

“... to write an introduction to his Collected Poems, when Betjeman’s old friends John Sparrow or Tom Driberg might have done a better job. ‘Why Lord Birkenhead?’ Hillier asks. Might it be because he was called ‘Lord’? If he had been plain Billy Birkenhead then Betjeman probably wouldn’t have bothered: he liked well-knowns, and being well ...”

“... the second Mrs Piper (‘my silken Myfanwy’) back into his imagined childhood: ‘Ringleader, tom-boy, and chum to the weak.’ The real Myfanwy decided to start a magazine bright enough to show the world that Britain was not beyond the reach of international art. ‘The battle has been pitched between abstract painting and sculpture and surrealist ...”

“... car had got into his paintings occasionally, and the stones all the time had looked less like big Henry Moores. I wish Nash had learned more from his friend Edward Burra. And so to the dump at Cowley. Totes Meer is quite a large painting – five feet wide and going on for three feet tall – and it puts its new size to good use. Gone is the Chirico ...”

“... Milly disappears behind them.’ Yet she had no self-confidence, none of the lordly conviction of Henry James or James Joyce; she awaited both reviews and the comments of her friends in a perfect pathos of fear and trembling, and each new attempt at a book was wholly tentative and unsure. Her ideas were all in the form of an attack on existing fictional ...”

“... that this was code for something else. The letter Bloom received – he was using the pseudonym Henry Flower – from a woman called Martha Clifford in the Lotus-Eaters episode was suggestive: ‘I have never felt so much drawn to a man as you. I feel so bad about. Please write me a long letter and tell me more. Remember if you do not I will punish you. So ...”

“... is as much as anything the famous painting of his death in a Holborn attic done in the 1850s by Henry Wallis – with the poet lying, across the bed in a kind of frozen entrechat. It looks like an enlargement of the postcard which, in an age of mechanical reproduction, it was to become, commemorating the tourist attraction which it was also to become. The ...”

“... is an invaluable account of its evolution, told by Martin Hickman of the Independent, and the MP Tom Watson. Watson has been particularly close to events. In September 2006, he spearheaded opposition within the Labour Party to Tony Blair’s refusal to schedule his departure from office. Since Blair enjoyed Rupert Murdoch’s solid support, that was enough ...”

“... great days under Anthony Sampson and Sylvester Stein – and the energetic assistant editor Henry Nxumalo, who was murdered on an investigative assignment – were coming to an end. Stein’s successor, Tom Hopkinson, was a more cautious editor, but Drum had assembled some of the best writers in the country, among ...”

“... Sepulture, issued by Chadwick’s General Board of Health and given him by his brother-in-law, Henry Austin, a sanitary engineer. The document presented yet again the horrors of overcrowded urban graveyards, a subject with which Dickens was familiar, having the magnum opus of G.A. Walker (‘Walker of the Graveyards’) already on his bookshelves. On 27 ...”

“... He was taken up by Maurice Bowra, and through him grew friendly with Kenneth Clark, John Sparrow, Henry Yorke, Alan Pryce-Jones, Osbert Lancaster, Robert Byron, Anthony Powell, Peter Quennell, Tom Driberg, Harold Acton, Christopher Sykes, Randolph Churchill, W.H. Auden, and lots of others, including Gaitskell once more ...”