“... whether it really existed. The Movement (a rather localised, mostly Oxford affair) and the Angry Young Men (more London, more of the theatre) were certainly the inventions of journalists, but they took on a kind of reality when the public was induced to view the young men in terms of those inventions, and also when the ...”

“... In the midst of writing his biography of Philip Larkin, Andrew Motion was contacted by a spiritualist who claimed to have been speaking to Larkin in the Beyond; later Larkin sent a posthumous word of approval for the book. Could the cosmic wires have been crossed and could the spiritualist have been talking to Martin Seymour-Smith? For this massive biography of Hardy – or ‘Tom’, as Seymour-Smith chummily calls him – has the vehemence of divine revelation and the fervour of personal mission ...”

“... was an agent lured by money. In his authorised history of MI5, published in 2009, Christopher Andrew concluded that Stonehouse had indeed spied for the Czechoslovaks, becoming ‘the only British politician (so far as is known) to have acted as a foreign agent while holding ministerial office’. Julian Hayes, Stonehouse’s great nephew, has also ...”

“... In the wake of its success in the States, there are a slew of novelisations, adaptations for very young readers, and even a brand-new Alcott novel on the way – an unpublished thriller called A Long Fatal Love Chase, written in 1866 and rejected then as too sensational. Kent Bicknell, the New England headmaster who heard that the manuscript was for sale and ...”

“... this last year discovered had become a distinguished molecular biologist at Edinburgh, but died young (in the 1990s) from Aids.17 January. Rupert returns from a walk with Owen, his brother, and son Freddy (five), worried because he had been unable to resist giving Freddy a kiss. Freddy is still at infants’ school. Had Rupert been vaccinated when I was, we ...”

“... Buenos Aires. All the adjoining offices were deserted, with the exception of one in which four young civil servants from the Ministry of the Interior, sent ‘to give us a hand at the start’, were talking nervously. They were frightened; democracy in Argentina was only twenty days old, following the removal of Galtieri. ‘We have to start right ...”

“... of spotting the ghosts of once famous musicians flitting through the pages. Others may admire the young man’s assumption that conventional middle-class manners and pleasures are compatible with an uninterrupted dedication to the craft of music. Andrew Motion has said that what he wants from a biography is information ...”

“... when ‘the Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead.’ At the beginning of the First World War young men were honoured to ‘Play up! play up!’ The Great War poets derive some part of their power and bitterness from the gulf between this idealised chivalric vision and the actuality of the hell they inhabit in the trenches. The poems strive to dislodge ...”

“... and the apple of his eye was undoubtedly his nephew, Arthur Balfour. A delicate and bookish young man, Balfour was at first written off by men of the world as a bit of a cissy. At Cambridge he was nicknamed ‘Pretty Fanny’, and it was noted that instead of riding and shooting at weekends he preferred to hang about with the girls. But Lord Salisbury ...”

“... Surely it must, with its philosophical, literary, philological presumptions. But which faculties? Young and happy and a touch self-important, we decided it didn’t much matter. People who were interested would tell each other, would get to hear of it and come along.But now we hit a snag. Out of the blue and what will seem very late in the day, Iris said it ...”

“... London had been thinking about new towns, and they were of a mind to decant as many of Glasgow’s young families as would happily go. East Kilbride, Cumbernauld, Livingston, Glenrothes and Irvine. These were the Scottish New Towns, all designated by 1968. For many, they seem to have represented the New World. The housing developments of Irvine New Town ...”

“... out. The trouble with making a career around Larkin is that the output is quite small, and others, Andrew Motion and Anthony Thwaite, have already picked the meat out of the life. What’s left after a couple of books of literary criticism wouldn’t amount to a serious life’s work for a mayfly. Or shouldn’t. There is, however, an unmistakable reverential ...”

“... opens spectacularly with William the undersized narrator witnessing the bashing to death of a young jazz player who proposes to cheat some drug dealers, the bashers appearing to be two dwarves. We then move back in time to William’s lacklustre love affair with Madeline, which never gets further than kisses, his attempts to use his talents as a jazz ...”

“... old, gendered dreams represented by the dolls. When Robbie on her journey approaches a group of young girls, she simpers and smiles in the way she thinks she is supposed to, and the girls are horrified. They left such dolls behind long ago. One of them calls Robbie a fascist. Again, Robbie should probably not know what this means. But she does, and is ...”

“... a very difficult because compacted poem, evidently arose from a terrible accident to a young man. And an extraordinary poem, ‘Wanting to live in Harlem’, from Final Solutions, makes irrefutable connections between a boy growing up in St Louis, dreams of a fair black woman, two boys in Harlem, and an account – taken from the Cambridge Ancient ...”