“... A Sense of Freedom from the paid confessions of other latterday Newgate heroes like Alfie Hinds or John McVicar is the intensely narcissistic attention Boyle turns on his early days in the Gorbals. Whereas McVicar perfunctorily stereotypes himself as the grammar-school boy perverted by his ‘milieu’ (fellow-con Charles Richardson’s Open ...”

“... Parmigianino on a half-globe of wood is the first impression which many people take away from John Ashbery’s poetry. The poem in which it appears, ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, a meditation on Parmigianino’s strange Mannerist painting, suddenly made Ashbery’s name much less obscure than his work. The collection to which it lent its name ...”

“... congregation were in tears.’ When he had become a celebrity, men as notoriously irreligious as John Wilkes and David Hume attended church services to hear him preach. ‘Tristram pleads his cause well, tho’ he does not believe one word of it,’ Wilkes noted with satisfaction. Reading his sermons, Thomas Gray thought that they showed ‘a sensible ...”

“... complexity of the mathematics involved in derivatives can’t be exaggerated. This was the reason John Meriwether, a famous bond trader, employed Myron Scholes – of the Scholes-Black equation – and the man with whom Scholes shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economics, Robert Merton, to be directors and co-founders of his new hedge fund Long-Term Capital ...”

“... much more than other woman writers, Victorian or contemporary. Writing to Dickens’s biographer, John Forster, about Charlotte Brontë’s forthcoming marriage to her curate Arthur Nicholls, Mrs Gaskell said that Charlotte ‘would never have been happy but with an exacting, rigid, passionate, law-giving man ... could never have borne not to be well-ruled ...”

“... and POMO lapsed into obscurity, until a strange thing, a kind of historical rhyme, occurred. Elton John bought Watford Football Club and appointed the energetic Graham Taylor as manager. Taylor, looking for a way of fulfilling his boss’s ambition of making Watford into a First Division team, came across a statistical survey which showed that the majority of ...”

“... the last American Presidential contest. This import-import business started in 1952 when a certain John Profumo – then the Tories’ media man – visited the US during the Presidential election and came back dazzled by what he had seen. It was, he wrote to the Party Chairman on his return, ‘absolutely essential to get all our people on all the programmes ...”

“... and revered Newman, who had, as Martin reminds us, intenser emotions about other men, Ambrose St John in particular, ‘than are usually considered normal’. Martin also gives an enchanting quote from Newman’s novel Loss and Gain, which somehow encapsulates the whole curious and colourful world of Victorian Oxford’s High Church friendships and ...”

“... me that Buford’s tastes were formed at university in the USA during the late Seventies, when John Barth and long bad teachable literary books were all the rage. Buford had responded by going the other way.) Among the Thugs isn’t like that, however: it’s written in a loose, chatty, almost gossipy style that works very well during the book’s moments ...”

“... designs, sober covers and superior typography (hangovers, as Morpurgo demonstrates, from John Lane’s Bodley Head). The Penguin aura was of solid, durable literature and (as Pelicans) sensible discussion. To work the paradox to death, one might claim that Penguins were paperbacks which, for most of their history, successfully passed themselves off ...”

“... informing symbol or emblem of Little Dorrit is the prison.’ The novelist is known to be of John Carey’s persuasion on the subject of the Dickens industry’s symbol-hunting. He makes his point with a heavily satirised gay Canadian Cambridge don who researches ‘his’ author, surrounded by congenial works like Dickens: The Baroque Lamp and Dickens ...”

“... the same thing does not happen again. One of Ratushinskaya’s poems describes a dream in which John the Baptist appears in the Gulag, filthy and ragged, and is succoured by one of the female inmates before he gets ready to fly away. She longs for a miracle, to see her daughter, and begs him to perform it. But he is silent, weeping, and she wakes up from a ...”

“... who died in 1811, E.H. Coleridge established beyond doubt that the poems were written in memory of John Edleston, a 15-year-old Trinity choirboy with whom Byron fell in love in October 1805. And Marchand has subsequently fleshed out the episode. Edleston (nicknamed ‘the Cornelian’) was working-class, fair, thin (Byron was at the time monstrously fat), and ...”

“... Dorothy Wordsworth makes it clear whose eyes her own journal is for, after William and his brother John had left her in Trasmere, and set off to walk into Yorkshire, ‘cold pork in their pockets’: ‘I resolved to write a journal of the time till W and J return, and I set about keeping my resolve, because I will not quarrel with myself, and because I shall ...”

“... and Sid is strongly suggested by various tricks in the novel. The author makes a personal, rather John Fowles-like, intervention in Chapter Seven, as the best man at Mr Lonely’s wedding. Reproduced photographs (from Morecambe’s ‘private collection’) show him in the wedding group (‘Eric and me, a lovely couple!’). For the rest, Mr Lonely has, as ...”