“... was the site of one of the defining moments of the civil rights struggle, when the black student James Meredith insisted, against violent opposition, on enrolling in the then all-white college in 1962. It’s generally agreed that Obama won the first third of the debate (about the economic crisis), while McCain won the second two-thirds, on foreign ...”

“... now a snack for sophisticates. Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy and a generation of English music-hall comedians wore bowlers to accentuate the contrast between their outré manners and those of the respectable middle classes. The bowler, as Fred Miller Robinson points out in The Man in the Bowler Hat (1993), had been designed as a riding hat for English ...”

“... she was. One shows her on the veranda of their house in Cornwall, staring down at the plump Henry James, who is lounging on the steps reading. When Leslie Stephen died and the Stephen children escaped to independence in Bloomsbury, Vanessa hung Cameron’s photographs in the white-painted hall: great men – their ...”

“... scheme. The Go-Between’s big secret – the illicit affair between Marian Maudsley of Brandham Hall and the Lawrentian farmer Ted Burgess – is revealed to the reader fairly early on, and Hartley makes no bones about drawing up a chargesheet against late Victorian sexual and class hypocrisy. Spies is a much shorter book, but it’s also much more taciturn ...”

“... in their exotic spear-waving poses. It was some relief to see the paperback of James Fox’s excellent White Mischief with its measured exposure of the shallow callous daftness of settler society circa 1940, popping cheekily up among them. Nairobi is still Africa’s safari capital, where the lucky tourist is offered all kinds of trips to ...”

“... Soane was born in 1753, the son of a Berkshire bricklayer. At 15 he met a London architect, James Peacock, who was closely associated with George Dance, architect to the City of London. Dance gave Soane a place in his household. After three or four years he left Dance for Henry Holland, from whom he learned more of the business side of building and on ...”

“... somehow performed by the Brothers Marx’. The bones of the plot do come from the same Henry James novella currently on view as a play at the Haymarket Theatre, but the comedy is not anarchic in the style of Groucho and Harpo – it is precise and well-ordered. A highly moral story is told rather in the manner of Hawkeye Pearce, before television ...”

“... years since the last one, so it must be time for a new book of poems by John Ashbery. Like the old James Bond films, Ashbery’s late instalments arrive punctually, and you buy your ticket knowing what to expect: a suave cartoon with ridiculous gadgets, clever one-liners and last-minute escapes. ‘So Long, Santa’, the penultimate poem in Ashbery’s ...”

“... customers from several nearby newspaper offices and – most important of all – from Tammany Hall, the headquarters of the Democratic Party. Anderson, who was becoming a successful businessman, had political aspirations himself and was connected with the Tammany Hall crowd. Crucially, he knew and was known by ...”

“... of Fashion, a parody of the short-lived vogue for belly pads that sprang up in London in 1793, and James Gillray’s Dido, in Despair (1801), which lampoons Emma Hamilton’s scandalous pregnancy by Lord Nelson. Seven months gone, Hamilton is portrayed as a grotesque battleaxe, arms and legs outstretched as she rises from bed in a bulging white nightgown and ...”

“... never cease: there’s the beautiful young mother he sees on the bus on his way to the Albert Hall; the girl he bids farewell to on a railway platform in Devon; the Irish girl at the theatre whose smile so obsesses him that he tries placing an ad in the personal columns to track her down. Nothing came of that (the paper returned his money, ‘no doubt ...”

“... Reading this Life of Lloyd George is like watching one of those old James Cagney movies where it’s established early on that the protagonist isn’t simply an anti-hero but, for all that he’s lionised, an irredeemable villain. The fun comes from watching him get away with all sorts of caddishness early on and then carry on the virtuoso act long after everyone has got his number ...”

“... The garrotting panic and legislation against footpads is still two years away. It’s Liberty Hall on the London streets in 1860. They walk down to St James’s. Nothing. Normally Caroline’s had her nancy jiggled two or three times by now. Reeling out of the Minor Club come a couple of swells. ‘Why,’ says ...”

“... James Merrill​ has in Langdon Hammer the biographer he would have wished for: intelligent, appreciative, sympathetic, thorough, a first-rate reader of the poems, and an excellent writer to boot. Merrill would have hated to be the subject of a plodding biography. He was all about stylishness and elegance, in poetry and in life ...”

“... names as Francis Coventry, Thomas Holcroft or Robert Paltock should be left out. (Not to mention James Boswell, author of Dorando.) The omission of John Cleland may be deliberate and provocative – it provokes me to cheerful assent – but Spender’s researches have apparently not extended to the point were she has heard of Congreve’s famous ...”