“... be happy to do the honours.’ When June checks into Room 6 at the Moonstone, under the name of Jane, as if in her depleted state she can only undertake the labour of changing a single letter, Cissy starts looking after her without a word. Their lives have come close to overlapping, with barely a single degree of separation between them, and June’s ...”

“... of the Giants, has a dispiriting vagueness to it. Though the Giants buy the formidable batter Rogers Hornsby in the close season, they still miss out on the Pennant race the following year. Schwartz concludes: ‘It is now years since I first became aware that the reality of the future was very likely to be very different than any present image or ...”

“... musicals to get in are Singing in the Rain and West Side Story rather than films starring Ginger Rogers or Judy Garland or Rita Hayworth or Barbra Streisand, or films choreographed by Busby Berkeley, with his unique combination of low popular appeal and high cinematic art. Thomson is passionately anti-middlebrow: The loveliness of Merchant-Ivory gives me ...”

“... for such a favour. This meanness extended to very small matters, such as his borrowing Samuel Rogers’s court dress when received as Laureate, though Rogers was a short and Tennyson a tall man; later he borrowed robes to enter the House of Lords, and often schemed to avoid paying his full dues to clubs. Perhaps his ...”

“... for Blondel’s Scenes from the lift. When they begin, Butts is living with a lover named Eleanor Rogers but also seeing John Rodker, an aspiring writer who is chiefly known today for his activities as a publisher of deluxe editions: a portfolio of Fifteen Drawings by Wyndham Lewis (1919), Ara Vos Prec by Eliot (1920), and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and ...”

“... this version of Defoe’s Tour. (I have just quoted the Penguin version of the Tour edited by Pat Rogers, also an abridgment, which does not cut death out of this description.) The Yale editors let us know about the chalky hill, but they have omitted the gallows. Why? Not, surely, because readers would find the information boring. This edition seems to desire ...”

“... has been no full-scale biography of Fielding since 1952, though a very good short life by Pat Rogers appeared in 1979. The two principal biographies, still widely used as works of reference, and which Martin Battestin’s long-awaited volume is designed to supersede, are those of Wilbur Cross (1918) and F. Homes Dudden (1952). Cross has usually been ...”

“... Picturedrome on Wortley Road. Here were Alexis Smith, Eve Arnold, Charles Boyer, and Tarzan’s Jane (and Mia Farrow’s mother) Maureen O’Sullivan. The four of us from Beyond the Fringe had been invited as a unit and Dudley Moore had been prevailed on (may even have volunteered) to play the piano. With Coward in the room this was perhaps foolhardy and ...”

“... of them were developed under Andrew Adonis’s academies programme for New Labour: the Richard Rogers-designed Mossbourne Community Academy in Hackney, which opened in 2004, is one of these, as is Zaha Hadid’s Evelyn Grace Academy in Brixton. The programme was launched in 2000 by the then education secretary, David Blunkett, who explained that if ...”