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“... birthday, was announced on an early page as occupying ‘that much disputed territory between five foot six and five foot seven’. The low-key phrasing, the wry tone – this seemed to promise that rare thing in Amis’s fiction, a mirror with a low distortion factor. But then one of Keith’s romantic competitors is ...”

“... put electrodes onto your teeth. It seemed like a bolt of lightning which struck you from head to foot and they put a string of metal pellets in my mouth which were difficult to swallow and when the current was turned on it felt as though a thousand pieces of glass were breaking inside me.’ The kidnappers, torturers and executioners of the Junta were still ...”

“... or in Brussels, confronting herself, playing with Chomskyan grammar (the famous test sentences ‘John is easy/eager to please’ are a running gag). There is much linguistic chatter, for she loves language to the point of enjoying bad puns and doing a good deal of unrepentant punning herself, the pun being a model of the natural instability of ...”

“... to face with his father but this is the final misleading daydream which Mitchell includes to wrong-foot the reader. These shifts between different layers of reality are frustrating. Mitchell sets out to evoke the fluid, improvised nature of dreaming. The title he borrows is a give-away: in John Lennon’s bland song about a ...”

“... Wrestling was big. Both WWF and WCW were available, briefly, on terrestrial TV, and my friend John and I founded our own wrestling magazine. We hashed it together with the help of the pre-broadband Ask Jeeves internet, surreptitiously, with nerve-shredding slowness, loading pages during IT lessons so that we could copy and paste match reports into no ...”

“... a defining creator of Broadway musicals; Cavett was a stand-up comedian who never set one loafered foot on a Broadway stage. And then there’s Marlon Brando who, according to Yaffe, came to prominence with On the Waterfront (1954), missing by the best part of a decade his volcanic performance as Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), which made him a ...”

“... an oblique and unsolicited tribute. There is evidence of this persistent dialogue of the deaf in John Hollander’s excellent book, The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art, a learned study of the tradition of ekphrasis – poetic description of paintings – illustrated by a ‘gallery’ of paintings and their tributary poems: Aretino on ...”

“... activities are not included in the book. One could argue that Lady Randolph Churchill’s famous foot-girls – in footmen’s uniform, suitably modified – were also doing their bit. War gave a temporary excuse to abandon domestic service, but the home front would have been in peculiar straits if all such labour had been withdrawn. Were women cooks less ...”

“... Psychoanalysis, says John Kerr, is ‘in a period of institutional decline’: ‘Candidacies are down, patients are harder to come by’ and other therapeutic disciplines are clamouring for attention. The seeds of this sorry situation were sown during the six-year partnership between Freud and Jung, when ‘historical accuracy first came to be less important than ideological correctness ...”

“... or less for City workers, not to mention Essex men and girls. After monarchs, ranging from King John, whose hunting lodge was at Writtle, to Henry VIII, who built New Hall at Boreham (still standing), came Elizabethan lord chancellors (one is buried at Saffron Walden, another at Felsted) and Georgian lord mayors and City luminaries (too many to list). Their ...”

“... escapades or of other people’s bad behaviour, a favourite being how, after a performance in John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me at Chichester for which he had been much praised, Alan was sitting in his dressing-room when there was a tentative knock on the door. It was Alec Guinness. He shook Alan’s hand, said, ‘You must be very tired,’ and ...”

“... acutely unhappy there, though the unhappiness had a long history, to do with his famously deformed foot, his abandonment virtually at birth by his profligate father, ‘Mad Jack’, his temperamental mother and the sexual attentions of a Calvinist nursemaid. When he wrote in the preface to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage that he wanted to ‘show that early ...”

“... Iris Murdoch was not dead before the battle for her memory began. Her husband John Bayley’s first volume of reminiscences, Iris: A Memoir, was published when she was in the later stages of dementia, an undignified, soul-stripping illness whose details Bayley did not spare. After her death in 1999 things sped up ...”

“... path-breaking book, Animals Men and Morals (1971), edited by Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch and John Harris. Singer acknowledges his debt to this pivotal work as well as to personal contact with some of the contributors, and his own 1975 book, of which there is now a welcome second edition, is largely a sustained working-out of the moral perspective ...”