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“... two largest characters in this Book are the schoolmaster and the academic. The former, based on Richard Busby, Headmaster of Westminster, boasts, half a century before Blake, of the mental ‘chain on chain’ with which he loads his pupils: Whate’er the talents, or howe’er design’d, We hang one jingling padlock on the mind. The latter – who is ...”

“... of future troubles. A baby brother died when she was six, and within the year another brother, Richard, died from scarlet fever. As Susannah Clapp put it in her review of Fitzgerald’s biography (LRB, 20 December 1984), Mew liked to play the child, but child’s play was always a peculiarly fraught affair. In one poem she addresses Sorrow and remembers ...”

“... centre which Wertham opened in a church basement in Harlem in 1946 with help from Ellison and Richard Wright. Six years later Wertham was called as an expert witness for the NAACP in one of the cases reviewed in Brown v. Board of Education. With the evidence of his experiences treating traumatised children in Harlem, he ...”

“... and cover a few boos, with a rendition of ‘Congratulations’, a song once sung by Cliff Richard to remind people that happiness is a feeling constantly under threat from the songs that celebrate it. ‘Beautiful white dress,’ the woman from the BBC said. ‘Hardly white,’ the person beside me said. ‘She’s got two huge children.’ ‘It ...”

“... was the occasion on which Eliot, at Pound’s behest, delivered a parcel containing a pair of old brown shoes to a distinctly unappreciative James Joyce. The shoes apart, Eliot was having a good time. He considered Lewis the most profitable person he had had to talk to for a long time. In Saumur, Lewis fell off his bicycle, and was soon looking for someone to ...”

“... as the nadir of postwar Britain. David Cameron (though it could just as easily have been Gordon Brown) read out the charge sheet at a Demos meeting in 2006: ‘economic decline . . . inflation, stagnation and rising unemployment . . . deteriorating industrial relations’. Nearly 30 million working days were lost to strikes in 1979, mainly during the ...”

“... Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim Morrison and Robert Penn Warren are alive. Richard Nixon is dead; and a Soviet-bloc skier named Ivana Trump – someone overhears Sixties psychic Jeanne Dixon saying – will assign her name to a novel she does not write with the full and worldwide backing of one of America’s largest publishing ...”

“... loyal to jazz since the Thirties, and The Duke Ellington Reader is worth its price simply for Richard Boyer’s magnificent profile of the great man (‘The Hot Bach’), which first appeared there in 1944. It is safe to say that, at that time, in no American city outside New York would nightclubs like Café Society, militantly devoted to the social ...”

“... and charming of all the guides. It has just been reissued by Faber.* ‘Colin’s son Richard is now editor of the Racing Pigeon. ‘The people who used to be into pigeon-fancying have changed altogether,’ says Colin, taking tea in Cockfosters. ‘They used to go down mines, or work in iron foundries, or spend their days in dark factories. They ...”

“... Notes. When I was a student I appeared in a play by Michael Codron, directed by his friend, Adrian Brown: just before we went on, Codron appeared to give us a Note. ‘Adrian is making this too heavy and Germanic,’ he said. ‘I want it to be light, French, a soufflé.’ This confused us performers and wrecked the show. Later in life, Codron became more ...”

“... genetics, psychology and mental testing, derives from his work. However, in 1957, G. Spencer Brown attacked the very basis of arguments from correlation in order to attack psychic experiments. The awful day had dawned: an apparent misuse of statistics in an uncontrolled area had begun to damage the key technique in Eysenck’s armoury. This, I ...”

“... of Crossman’s on the opposite side. In Parliament, he was overtaken by younger men – George Brown, Jim Callaghan, even Denis Healey. When Labour returned to power in 1964, he was given the important, but hardly central, office of President of the Board of Trade. Three years later, he was brutally and unceremoniously sacked. Since then, he has hung on in ...”

“... petulance or justified outrage’. Cummings got on with no one except his Harvard friend Brown; they treated their chef de section with contempt; they washed and shaved less than they should have done and they got into deep trouble with the censor. In short, they were nuisances, and the fact that it all ended in the internment centre described in The ...”

“... precision. This, coupled with the memoir form, put me oddly in mind of a book by his contemporary, Richard Rayner. The Blue Suit is also a coming-of-age work with an Oxbridge protagonist and intelligence recruiters in the wings; the two books even mention the same superstar literature don (I shall call him ‘George’, since that is his name). And both, for ...”

“... has some ten thousand members. However, as James Morone, a professor of political science at Brown University, reassures us, his colleagues in the discipline have themselves a very defective grasp of American political culture. In particular, Morone believes that political scientists are in thrall to the misguided notion that the classical liberalism ...”