“... bright afternoon with the paths down to the river covered in untrodden snow and the Wharfe winding black between the drifts. Building at the priory must have been going on until the very eve of the Dissolution, with the uncompleted west tower begun by Abbot Moon in 1520. The confidence such plans imply still surprises me as I’ve never quite got rid of the ...”

“... of blues records. A brief affair with the daughter of the champion of the English Revolution, Christopher Hill, Master of Balliol. The interestingly named Fanny Hill was also involved, at this period, with Raymond Carr, Warden of St Antony’s College, which Marks describes as the ‘CIA’s Oxford annexe’. The property that the postgraduate Marks ...”

“... experience racing fast cars, and lies dying unnoticed while her chums drink cocktails; and in Black Mischief Basil Seal unwittingly eats his fiancée, Prudence, who has been cooked up into a stew.That last novel bears its modernist credentials most clearly: it is a rewriting of Heart of Darkness, done the second time as farce. Basil is Waugh’s version ...”

“... of this art being Guy Liddell. The development of this intelligence community is the theme of Christopher Andrew’s book, which contains the first reliable narrative history of the secret services from Victorian days to the present. Needless to say, he has received no encouragement from Whitehall, and former members of MI5 have been warned not to talk to ...”

“... of Gef wasn’t a sign of madness, and awarded him damages of £7500. The story of Gef, in Christopher Josiffe’s meticulous telling, is both brilliantly silly and irreducibly mysterious. After seven years of research into the legend of the talking mongoose, Josiffe, a librarian at Senate House, is still not entirely clear about the nature of the hoax ...”

“... of postwar hopefulness that things could change. My editor during those excited days of hope, Christopher Falkus at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, asked me to contribute to a book of essays by women on what they thought had shaped them as women. The Virgin Mary was the single most dominant and crucial element in my female life so far, and so I wrote a short piece ...”

“... love. With her ‘Kensington jeweller’s elocution’ and ‘gaze of a demon/Between curtains of black Mongolian hair’, Assia is portrayed simply as dangerous, too foreign and unstable. She is ‘slightly filthy with erotic mystery’ and has nothing like the presence of Plath in the volume.Looking at the letters he wrote to Assia, one may feel that he ...”

“... concludes: ‘I see Milosz calls poetry a dividend from ourselves: high yields, mon vieux.’ Christopher Reid, the editor of this weighty selection of Heaney’s correspondence, adds disconcertingly: ‘Below the signature, in Mahon’s hand, on the actual letter in the Emory archive: “Pompous ass”.’ Was it unguarded of Heaney to take such ...”

“... to those who have one without the other. Those who have both will find that, among contemporaries, Christopher Reid and Michael Hofmann are classified as love poets but Craig Raine and Tony Harrison as blue versifiers. Only a few poets make both, including Seamus Heaney, who has two poems unworthy of him in the Whitworth (one about unfreezing a vaginal ...”

“... as often. The unexceptionably level-headed hermogenean observation (set against the black insanity of family vendetta in Verona) is deliberately put in a form which seems designed to provoke a cratylic response from the more literary listener or reader: ‘If a rose were called a “stink-wort” I’m not sure that it would smell quite as ...”

“... Tory) can put his case lucidly and rationally. But the impression darkens upon reading Christopher Homm, a novel technically interesting in that it proceeds chronologically backwards from its central character’s senility in the opening chapter to his birth in its last, and which I have seen promoted as a major work, but which for me has the ...”

“... ask to see it. A dead mouse I will look at. He says ‘There’s someone else,’ and holds up a black silk glove. I have to wonder how Arthur can be so thick as to prefer his word-processor to delicious Winnie, but then he is merely a fictional example of the general rule that in affairs of the heart boys will be buffoons. A buffoon is the central figure ...”

“... table, McCullers tinkering manically with The Member of the Wedding. One day he breezed into Christopher Isherwood’s Santa Monica home, and Isherwood was entranced. ‘Tennessee is the most relaxed creature imaginable: he works till he’s tired, eats when he feels like it, sleeps when he can’t stay awake.’ Isherwood went on to describe the park at ...”

“... has only the faintest of suggestions that we have created him or that he has answered our call. Christopher Lee, in a series of Hammer movies, was dignified and handsome, but far too natty to have come out of anyone’s unconscious. These Hammer films, incidentally, seem now to have acquired a patina of critical respectability, rather as if Sid James, with ...”

“... and Crafts movement shifted aesthetes’ attention away from great houses to country cottages, black and white farmhouses, and small manor houses like Kelmscott. The past celebrated by William Morris or C.R. Ashbee was one of homeliness, craftsmanship and simplicity. Its location was the cottage and the village green, not the great hall and the long ...”