“... gone blind, and Christ was the Messiah.’ Railton does his work only too well and on the last page we see one of his younger kinsmen, who disappeared in 1917 in Soviet Russia with other British agents, back in England in the Thirties, at Cambridge, briefing the undergraduate Donald Railton who has already been recruited as a mole. This is stirring ...”

“... than the Book of Revelation. Orwell had Eton and the military police to draw on for 1984, and Alan Moore (V for Vendetta) had Orwell. What’s interesting is that for this ‘entirely new departure’ James stayed so close to the sense that runs through all her work of the horror of human intimacy, of touch (‘a collection of bones loosely held together ...”

“... relaxed and the journalists went home. The Mboya assassination takes up just a few lines on page 203 of The Politics of the Independence of Kenya, but stands as a measure of the extent to which contemporary reporting is biased by the received wisdom of the day. Nothing Kyle says actually contradicts the tribal rivalry interpretation of the assassination ...”

“... ago. There is a certain amount of unjustly neglected travel writing, such as the work of the late Alan Booth. But Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset Maugham, a Hemingway or a Paul Bowles. No one has had a greater yearning or been better qualified to fill this gap than Donald ...”

“... that is blazingly radical. Well, once again, you could argue that myth has overtaken reality. As Alan Plater points out, Jimmy Porter is far from being a working-class hero. By trade, he is a very small shopkeeper (he runs a sweet stall). When he isn’t enjoying himself slumming around with Cliff, he’s berating the workers for being noisy at the ...”

“... pleasure in anything else, because Hamilton gives him no inner life to speak of. From the first page of The West Pier, he’s seen as belonging to a ‘rare but identifiable’ type, one the narrator has studied in unconventional detail. Some of the information on these nameless ones is quantitative. ‘Seventy-five per cent of them belong to the submerged ...”

“... of viral decimation, with breakthroughs commercial and institutional (or both, in the case of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, which won the Booker Prize). At the same time the market for literary fiction has shrunk, and writers who were perhaps thrilled when bookshops began to have Gay and Lesbian sections were soon dismayed to find that their ...”

“... fact, the more abstractions they indulge in. Sanford Levinson, for example, tentatively discusses Alan Dershowitz’s proposal that government officials should be forced to seek warrants from judges in order to torture terrorist suspects. Hoping to make the reality of torture – and the pain of its victims – visible and concrete, Levinson insists that ...”

“... its funeral rites when Labour came to power seven years later. Yet at the turn of the millennium, Alan Milburn replaced Dobson and Labour introduced a new, more radical version of that market. It was Labour that introduced foundation trusts, allowing hospital managers to borrow money and making it possible for state hospitals to go broke. It was Labour that ...”

“... hard to imagine anything less engaging or novelistic, but the vitality of the whole, the sense of Alan Bennett characters filled with Old Testament fervour, was strong enough to blot it out. Towards the end of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit the narrator wonders what would have happened if she had stayed in the church. She decides she would have been a priest ...”

“... also talked about Fisher’s ideas for future projects: Red Shift, a publishing imprint, after the Alan Garner novel; an essay on John Akomfrah’s film triptych The Unfinished Conversation, featuring the memories of Stuart Hall; a book of essays about Kanye West. These interests are all evident in Fisher’s work too.The second memorial lecture was given in ...”

“... of Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s squadron. I fear that The Coasting Pilot, published by Mount and Page of Tower Hill throughout the 18th century, probably deserves some of the blame, although my ancestors may have partially redeemed themselves (and added to their profits) by publishing pamphlets on both sides of the longitude controversy, both pro and anti ...”

“... beautiful and I wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole’), and the decisive contribution made by Alan Arkin, who had long coveted the role of John Singer, and told the screenwriter: ‘You gotta give me the part now ... I’ve gone to all the trouble of becoming a star just so I could play it.’ Arkin is clearly more fluent in Hollywood hyperbole than in ...”

“... the late Valerie Eliot and on many archives (especially those of Faber). Occasionally, there’s a page with only a couple of lines by Old Possum on it, and about fifty lines of small-print annotation, but the notes themselves contain a treasury of Eliotiana. There are a few very minor mistakes, but in scope, detail and quality of annotation this edition is ...”

“... Maugham carried on for another two decades. There were further travels, further books. Alan Searle, a former social worker whose ‘pronounced cockney accent’ gave rise to much comment, replaced Haxton in the role of lover-factotum. (Grand visitors disliked him, and Meyers does too.) Fortified – or so he hoped – by regular injections of ...”