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“... come to their own conclusion about how they do their depending on the people they need. So despite Geoffrey Hill’s misgivings about Eliot, reported in some detail in this book (Hill has talked about ‘the progressive deterioration of Eliot’s creative gifts’ in his later poetry), Ricks is determined, in the name of true friendship, that Eliot must not be ...”

“... his bank job (at the time the epitome of secure and respectable employment) to take on a role in Geoffrey Faber’s new publishing firm, and he was about to expose the patchiness of his scholarship by giving a set of lectures to an exacting audience of Cambridge dons. Ruin was still a possibility, even if not a vocation, and the main interest of the third ...”

“... the Anglican parson was a male chauvinist, a macho bore. Gay quotes the delightful story, told in Geoffrey Faber’s Oxford Apostles, of how the convert W.G. Ward once described a dream he had had, in which he found himself at a dinner party next to a veiled lady, who charmed him more and more as they talked. At last he ...”

“... complete a gathering of his criticism has ever been made. Two volumes of fiction (from Watch and Ward to The Bostonians) are already out; four more are to come. I puzzled a bit over how complete the collection was, looking in vain for James’s essays on Tennyson’s plays and on Ibsen. Then I unravelled the phrase (offered by the editor, Leon Edel): ‘the ...”

“... student, who was tormented into paranoid schizophrenia by his colleagues and committed to a mental ward by the Director after Arct had warned him of a counter-revolutionary plot, and who was last seen by Polanski lying in a hospital bed muttering and covered with bruises, the other patients having duffed him up for tearing a crucifix off the wall – there’s ...”

“... and Neo-Romantic poetasters, mostly, with Edith Sitwell and Roy Campbell as potential allies, Geoffrey Grigson lurking threateningly in the wings and T.S. Eliot a very distant god. The former Muriel Camberg joined this cast in 1944 after a stint in southern Africa, where she’d ended a short marriage to the unstable if catchily named Sydney Spark. She ...”

“... any such crew would include both A.S. Byatt and Jilly Cooper or place Jeffrey Archer alongside Geoffrey Hill. How, if at all, are these two vignettes from the literary life of the period to be connected? Should we be wondering about the ways commercial changes in the world of publishing affected the standing of authors? Should we be thinking about the ...”

“... his unusual background, was the man to step forward, though others – Margaret Mead, Erich Fromm, Geoffrey Gorer – were writing along the same lines. Friedman quotes Erikson’s account of how he first saw the centrality of his concept when he was one of a panel examining traumatised war veterans. Always averse to the psychoanalytical view of the world as ...”

“... only critical and commercial success; Lunar Caustic, which would draw on his stay in a psychiatric ward; a two-part saga about an embattled author figure very much like Lowry himself called The Ordeal of Sigbjørn Wilderness; a trilogy about the writing (and drinking) life, Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, Eridanus and La Mordida, again featuring ...”

“... others to do the same. When in 1810 her daughter-in-law was in the midst of a dalliance with Sir Geoffrey Webster, Lady Holland’s son, Lady Melbourne told Caroline that her behaviour the previous night had been ‘disgraceful in its appearances and . . . disgusting in its motives’. That may seem pretty rich coming from her. But she was complaining not ...”

“... outsiders called ‘a sort of Welsh Alsatia’. Sometimes they resorted to the workhouse casual ward, though in the later 19th century that generally meant a day’s forced labour to ‘earn’ their hard resting place and meagre provisions. According to the journalist Henry Mayhew, many wanderers returned to town in the winter ‘as regularly as ...”

“... most modern soldier of our time. The trap into which he fell is still set. This new biography by Geoffrey Perret, an Anglo-American soldier-turned-historian, is not the last word; but it is a big improvement on its forerunners, and Perret has dug up important new material. MacArthur was born in a dusty US Army post at Little Rock, Arkansas, on 26 January ...”

“... decisions unit’, others to the so-called emergency assessment unit (EAU), a large ward described by the Healthcare Commission as poorly designed, busy, noisy, ‘chaotic’. Nurses in the EAU were inadequately trained and it was common for a patient’s condition to deteriorate unnoticed or for necessary medication not to be ...”

“... with all the hardships of his young life. While he was in St James’s one of the patients on his ward hanged himself in the toilets, presumably driven mad by the intolerable itching. Michael P. is as kindly as ever and me as dull, three old(-ish) men having their lunch, next stop the bowling green. 10 March. To Durham where there are not many visitors this ...”

“... and then as assistant editor of the Times, of which he might have become editor if Barrington-Ward had had his way. He wrote a great deal at this time. International Relations between the World Wars, first published in 1937 (under a different title), is a very useful little work if you want to look up, say, the details of Reparations. In this period, he ...”