“... found the core of his talent. It all started with a spirited exchange in print with Henry James. In September 1884, when Stevenson was new to that oasis of convalescents, he picked up a copy of Longman’s Magazine, which carried James’s essay ‘The Art of Fiction’. He knew ...”

“... sparing herself no end of eventual aggravation.Into this vacancy the editor and biographer James Atlas tentatively ventured. He had made his name with a Life of Delmore Schwartz in 1977 and had matured into a venerable if fidgety fixture in New York publishing. He and Roth had been friendly for decades. Early in their relationship, which began in ...”

“... Odd Man Out, which was released in 1947. Bethnal Green masquerades as an expressionist Belfast. James Mason is an IRA gunman on the run. Twenty years later, his Hollywood career in decline, Mason returned once more to an East End of smoky pubs, dark shadows, charity hostels, to narrate a documentary version of Geoffrey Fletcher’s The London Nobody ...”

“... comment. He developed an interest in writing and the theatre and planned to become a writer. Like James Boswell, he was persuaded by his father to practise the Law but, unlike Boswell, he became a successful lawyer, initially specialising in divorce but later emerging as the champion of any literary activity threatened by censorship. The resemblance to ...”

“... of the Lubetkin and Tecton High Point flats, and of William Lescaze buildings for the Darlington Hall Estate, are still wonderfully convincing. Attempts to make the same style work cheaply do not. Wells Coates’s Minimum Flat was all too easy to translate into something which offered a minimum life. Artist-designed fabrics on the whole do not stand ...”

“... 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 ...”