“... light’. Although the Great War forces its way into Secret Destinations, overshadowing even ‘Alice Springs’, the poem to engage most overtly with war is one called ‘1940’. It reveals the difficulty of writing about the Second World War. By virtue of both its title and its subject, a mass of men waiting to go to war, it invites comparison with ...”

“... of a small sect who call themselves ‘ethical’ or ‘vegetarian’ vampires, having elected to hunt wild animals instead of feeding off human blood. Edward loves Bella too; but he can barely let himself even kiss her, for fear of ‘losing control’, squashing her to death in his super-powered passion – ‘I could reach out, meaning to touch your ...”

“... sticks in the gullet and seems definitely ugly: I mean his pharasaic forbidding his friend Violet Hunt his house when it appeared she might figure in divorce proceedings. His explanation was quite frank: it was a matter of her ‘position’, and by implication of his. I really don’t see how an old friend of yours could feel or pronounce your being in a ...”

“... these rather than risking his own neck by posting them on to the Kremlin. And that was all. This Alice took one step through the looking-glass, turned in alarm to retreat, and found his way blocked by his own reflection scowling and mouthing the word ‘traitor’. So he lived with his ‘secret’, which really consisted only in his knowledge that Guy ...”

“... States where his father’s death had followed hard upon his mother’s, begins gradually to house-hunt, settling at last for a handsome Kensington flat as high up as a Baudelairean attic but very much more gorgeous (he decorated it in crimson, yellow and sky blue, colours that later anecdotes report on his waistcoats – James’s Puritanism always had its ...”

“... When male life expectancy is about forty, this is decline.’ Or about the reason Leigh and John Hunt described the Prince of Wales as ‘a man who has just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country’: Wilson explains in square brackets that George III had been on the throne since 1760 although the date of the ...”

“... here in 1990) borrows the form of a Chandleresque detective story for the tale of a hunt for a mutant Manchurian sheep with the ability to inhabit people’s minds. Having possessed (or ‘sheeped’) a soldier in the Imperial Army in the Thirties, it has turned him into an underworld Boss whose extensive outreach includes most of the public ...”

“... and an adorably hare-brained suffragette full of feminine ‘logic’, based on his American wife, Alice. ‘I hope you sometimes feel miserable, too!’ she wrote to him once, but it seems unlikely he did. Lehmann later said that she was always in love with her father, and Selina Hastings confirms that her parents’ relationship set the psychological pattern ...”

“... failed him.Keats spent his last weeks in England in the care of Mrs Brawne, after fleeing Leigh Hunt’s chaotic hospitality in a rage over the household’s careless treatment of a letter from his painfully beloved Fanny Brawne. But he needed to leave in order to spare her the sight of the horrors he knew were coming for him. Severn’s ...”

“... not be engaged in genealogical research), and, in a particularly perplexing branch of the fable, Alice B. Toklas, loosely conflated with Alice in Wonderland, munching a magic mushroom. It’s a bewildering display of narrative invention, less meretricious on each rereading, and written with that combination of visual ...”

“... novels as Lesley Egan, not in her own name. There are two hands at work in the Alice Perrin entry, one of whom thinks the author published her first book in 1901 (wrong), another who thinks it was 1894 (right). Marie Corelli’s The Master Christian is oddly transformed into The Masterful Christian (a feminist-Freudian slip?). The contents ...”

“... readers as a chestnut, maybe even an obstacle on the road to Virginia Woolf, Thomas Pynchon and Alice Walker, while the later novels just look ‘weird’. On the one hand, the author of Women in Love is too damn serious, too damn end-of-the-world to be any fun in a world of MTV; on the other hand, the creator of The Woman who Rode Away and the kitschy ...”

“... Danish anthropologist Rane Willerslev, accompanying a group of Siberian Yukaghir people on a bear hunt, was struck by the way the hunters mocked the taboos and rituals involving the dead bear and shouted coarse insults at their helping-spirit. When he asked them about it, they laughed it off, telling him: ‘We are just having fun … without laughter there ...”

“... Henry Manne, gentleman, ‘complained to be a very disordered fellow, and keeping company with Alice Sherwood, a common whore’; Joan Wilson, ‘charged with incontinency and keeping company with Richard Ganny in uncivil manner, upon the complaint of Wilmote, the said Ganny’s wife’; Susan Ellington, ‘for keeping very evil rule and light huswifery in ...”

“... to trot briskly away in quest of a rack with useable cycles, to take part in a cross-town treasure hunt. But one woman, now a determined pedestrian, told me she’d found herself being charged for rides she’d never made, in places she had never been. The non-return charge is £300. Barclays keep an entire department to argue over unfair deductions. I ...”