“... erupts: ‘I won’t have you monopolising the agony market.’ Elsewhere, he cheers up Kenneth Williams, who is ‘low and depressed’, and criticises him on another occasion for possible tactlessness – talking too freely in front of his own mother. Williams is a good character witness: ‘What is heart? If we’re ...”

“... one or two slip-ups en route. Bacon is made to sound too much like Descartes; the philosopher John Toland was not British; and Raymond Williams was not a Marxist. Neither was Althusser the cold-blooded adversary of experience painted here. It is true that he saw experience as the homeland of ideology; but ideology is by ...”

“... dust along the ground into his mouth as he sang.’ Bowles was especially flattered by Tennessee Williams’s response to this macabre narrative. ‘Oh, I think it’s wonderful, Paul,’ Williams declared: ‘But you mustn’t publish that story. People will think you’re a monster.’ It is clear that Bowles felt such ...”

“... A 1984 publication from Lawrence and Wishart, 1939: The Communist Party and the War, edited by John Attfield and Stephen Williams, complements and illuminates the new volume. This is the transcript of a conference held in 1979, in which several Communists of the 1939 generation explained what they thought was going on in ...”

“... commentary on Britain . . . And it shifted in tone; from the anxious to the apocalyptic. In John Fowles’s novel Daniel Martin, published in 1977, the expatriate narrator says of his homeland: ‘England is already a thing in a museum, a dying animal in a zoo.’ Beckett pulls many other examples (Lessing, Drabble, Spark) from what he calls the ...”

“... Bronx. O’Brien is one of a long line of hicks from upstate who made their way to the big city. John Ashbery, whose work O’Brien disapproved of (‘the poetry of programmatic inconsequence’), had arrived in NYC 15 years earlier, from a farm near Lake Ontario. Many of O’Brien’s poems could be characterised as pastoral. This is ‘East Branch’: a ...”

“... way to moralising repulsion and evangelical enthusiasm. The Victorian Sanskritist Monier Monier-Williams described Tantra as Hinduism’s ‘last and worst stage of medieval development’. The instinct to treat it as a kind of degeneration, a ‘lamented supplement’ to pristine orthodoxy, as one scholar of Buddhism has put it, is still common. Reading ...”

“... visit him: Wystan Auden and Chester Kallman, Graham Greene, Allen Tate, Louis MacNeiec, Tennessee Williams, Noel Coward, John Braine, Mary McCarthy ... (a shade slyly, Mrs Spark, after all a director in her own way, may here be self-indulgently thinking of some of her own old pals). He meditates the great turn of the times ...”

“... cocktail party. The opening page of The Breezes (1995) clarifies the pessimism of the first novel. John Breeze’s mother was ‘killed by lightning’, we learn, but we mustn’t suppose lightning can’t strike twice. John thinks of Wile E. Coyote, whose crackpot attempts to catch Road Runner always meet with ...”

“... career is rendered in print-out jargon: he is adopted into the Bennett family, goes to exclusive Williams College, distinguishes himself in the OSS during the war, rises to Deputy Assistant Director of the CIA, falls heir to the Bennett industrial empire and ends up ‘Master of Loon Lake’. Thus abstracted, Loon Lake can be seen to make the same grand ...”

“... into her new classroom, the children dive for cover under their desks, shrieking. Only one boy, John, stands firm, saying: ‘I ain’t afeared.’ The children are often hungry, unwashed, shivering in threadbare hand-me-downs, only able to express themselves through blows and screams and tears. This was shocking to Gilroy and her fellow immigrants from the ...”

“... of American talent was centred on London. Well, not all: Dreiser, Eugene O’Neill, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens (like Pound and his protégés, an early contributor to Poetry, Chicago) stayed behind; so did the group of young painters and photographers associated with Alfred Stieglitz’s quarterly Camera Work. Besides, it was always possible ...”

“... he set out. What seemed false had become true.Qā’sElid had inadvertently become what Malcolm John Rebennack Jr, in his first work as Dr John, billed as the ‘last of the best’:They call me the gris-gris manGot many clients, come from miles around,Running down my prescriptionI got medicine to cure all y’alls ills,I ...”

“... has led Roy Jenkins and David Marquand to abandon the party. A desperate public cry to Shirley Williams: why have you got so lost in that company, one with ineffable self-confidence but without either a social base or alternative policies – you who once knew the Labour Party as inherently a coalition? I think of my late and lamented friend, ...”

“... a charming woman who wrote wry nostalgic sketches to a major figure in Victorian studies. Raymond Williams jump-started this re-evaluation in 1958, when he described her first novel, Mary Barton, as ‘the most moving response in literature to the industrial suffering of the 1840s’. Although Williams went on to complain ...”