“... only equalled by the facility with which the reader can gobble it up, and that creates a kind of love relationship, a kind of unthinking happy embrace which I feel to be totally inimical and death to the novel ... and this is why I think in the long run we do have to reject the idea of the traditional novel being all that we can have. I do not mean to say ...”

“... not just a mockery of it, as is the proleptic and unacknowledged winning entry in that contest, Harold Pinter’s Proust Screenplay, written in 1972 for Joseph Losey, but never filmed: a brilliant, synoptic, allusive evocation of the whole of A la recherche du temps perdu. Völker Schlöndorf’s film Swann in ...”

“... a hanger-on, and played a significant part in getting Barnes’s Nightwood into print. She fell in love and had affairs, mostly, but not always, with men. She was good-looking in those days, a ‘traffic-stopper’, according to Wesley, ‘not strictly beautiful but unforgettable: widely spaced blue eyes, yellow hair, golden complexion, a lovely figure’. In ...”

“... in the Houston arts scene. He was supposed to be completing his degree – he had fallen in love with phenomenology – but there was too much else to do. He founded a university quarterly called Forum, and set about publishing everyone he admired, including Walker Percy, William Gass and the not yet famous Marshall McLuhan. In 1960, he joined the board ...”

“... admiration is Ted Solotaroff’s essay, ‘Silence, Exile and Cunning’ (1970), which antedates Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence by three years. There, Solotaroff shows how the aspiring writer’s mind, locked in the cell of its preconceptions, receives visits from real life, but for the most part gets down to serving the sentence. Flaubert was the ...”

“... during which they sent each other around a thousand letters. ‘My poet, my mistress, my lover! I love you all the ways tonight, but most of all for the grace of your lines,’ Palmer wrote (she had studied classics at Bryn Mawr, and introduced Barney to Sappho). Barney had many other lovers; Souhami recounts that she once boasted of having eighteen different ...”

“... It struck him ‘as a dramatic and pretty subject’. Young Lord Stafford, it seemed, was in love with Lady Grosvenor, whom he had known before her marriage, but had now no expectation of being able to marry as her husband was alive and robust. ‘Yielding to family pressure,’ as James put it, ‘he offered his hand to a young, charming, innocent ...”

“... mood in this early uncertain period of the war. He was being turned into a ‘poster-poet’, Harold Monro, the editor of Poetry Review, wrote, but ‘“He did his duty? Will you do yours?” is hardly the moral to be drawn.’ Maybe not, but it was handy for the government all the same. Soon enough, the myth of the heroic soldier-poet was joined by that ...”

“... English and Irish ones anyway? Samuel Beckett represented his university against Northants. Harold Pinter, who wrote wistfully of seeing Len Hutton in his prime, captained a team called the Gaieties XI. Simon Gray, David Hare and Ronald Harwood are or were known to be keen on the game, too. And Tom Stoppard, another follower, has a striking set-piece in ...”

“... by a homosexual honeytrap on a trip to Prague. Instead of having Stonehouse prosecuted, Harold Wilson asked him to the Number Ten sitting room for a chat. The prime minister wasn’t inclined to believe the accusations. It turned out that Frolik had never actually met Stonehouse, and there was no evidence that Stonehouse was homosexual. In his ...”

“... to Vassar, scene of her most commercially successful novel, The Group. After Vassar, she married Harold Johnsrud, an aspiring theatrical writer/director; wrote her first pieces for The Nation; underwent the break-up of the marriage; met the Partisan Review people; met Edmund Wilson; and married him. ‘He did not smoke, but after a long and arduous ...”

“... to take bets that resurrection is ruled out. Thirty years ago John Updike gave us in Rabbit Run Harold ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, the basketball-player lately wed to tippling slatternly Janice Springer, who failed to cope. When baby Becky drowns through the negligence of Janice, Rabbit runs away. In Rabbit Redux, the title elegantly lifted from Trollope, Rabbit ...”

“... at the highest level and are lucky enough to be able to produce an endless stream. We would dearly love to produce bowlers like these, but climate, pitches, the structure of the game, and genetics, are all against it. The lengths we will go to in our quest are illustrated by Woodcock’s mention of a sponsored find-a-fast-bowler competition last year, the ...”

“... he’d first seen Iolanthe in 1907. ‘It’s impossible to believe that a lord chancellor in love with a fairy can be anything but ridiculous,’ he told Leonard Woolf; ‘but one goes, and when the moment comes, it’s simply great … I should like to go every night, for the comedy and wit is as enthralling as the tragedy.’ Strachey wasn’t far ...”

“... admiring letters to the Australian Labor prime minister, Ben Chifley. In 1970 the Sun supported Harold Wilson and in 1972 Murdoch’s papers, notably the Australian (a national daily he had founded in 1964), supported Gough Whitlam. There is, though, a psychological and temperamental unity, a commitment to a ‘radicalism’ that forms a thread between his ...”