“... associated, interchangeable motifs. The stories themselves are of no great importance except for young Skidmore, whose world is steadily depopulated as the year goes by. The reader’s pleasures are other and various. One of them is the intertextual chase. Here, for instance, Stead simultaneously parodies Robbe-Grillet’s degree-zero text and, by putting ...”

“... and yet not cause offence. He aims in life for the same perilous liberty as, in a letter to the young actor Esmé Percy (15 March 1913), he ascribes to certain of the roles in his plays – ‘those very dangerous parts of mine, which consist of saying things which are unpardonable if uttered by unprivileged persons’. The present batch of letters is ...”

“... camps had moved on to mass extermination. Such information about this as got out – for instance, Arthur Koestler’s description in Horizon of early experiments with gas – was not readily believed by readers who were by then in the middle of a war. There was plenty of evidence in the end, as the Allies occupied the camps: even so, much of the truth was ...”

“... in his tense partnership with Conrad – and, in his late thirties, had much to offer the aspiring young. But neither the old guard nor les jeunes quite saw him as ‘the real right thing’. Conrad made use of him but never really thought that he belonged in the big league. James, if pressed, would have called him slapdash, unreliable, too vulgarly worried ...”

“... his wedding and had been in the British Embassies at Berlin, Constantinople and St Petersburg, and Arthur Hamilton Lee, a Tory MP. According to Morris, ‘their urbane, literate reports’ kept Roosevelt up to date ‘with court affairs and privileged gossip’. As members of the ‘secret du roi’ – TR’s intimate and reliable circle of friends ...”

“... or in terms of business activities’. Does Ewing really think that the accountancy firms, Arthur Andersen and KPMG, gave such sterling service to Labour (£2.5m from KPMG) without thought of the billions of pounds in Treasury contracts that followed? As for the ‘fund-raising ethics committee’ set up after Bernie Ecclestone’s £1m donation to get ...”

“... One thing the Tate retrospective brought home to me was the depth of Nash’s attachment as a young man to Blake, and to the Rossetti strain of Pre-Raphaelitism; and this helped me understand why so much from the past of the landscape tradition that might have helped him – been adaptable to 20th-century purposes – remained essentially unavailable to ...”

“... The Misery Index​, a crude measure of economic discomfort, was thought up by Arthur Okun, a neo-Keynesian who chaired Lyndon B. Johnson’s Council of Economic Advisers in the late 1960s. Okun’s formula simply added together the unemployment rate and the rate of inflation. A good Misery Index might be about 5 (2 per cent inflation and 3 per cent unemployment); Britain’s currently sits at 8 ...”

“... dominant ‘quality’ Sunday paper, certainly in its cultural and political influence among the young if not always in terms of its circulation. It belonged to the era of what Lewis calls the ‘benign monopolies of English life’ – the BBC, the NHS, Penguin paperbacks – as yet unconcerned about ‘low-grade competition from upstart rivals’. The ...”

“... I’d never been there before, never met Corso. I’d seen him, in the tweed sports jacket of a young academic, performing, sober, at the famous Albert Hall ‘Wholly Communion’ readings on 11 June 1965. I’d watched the Peter Whitehead video. American poets in those days, with their crisper sense of history and occasion, wore suits and ties. I’d read ...”

“... itself. We’d done it! Here was Benjamin Britain OM, ‘Baron Britain of Aldeburgh’, whose Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra was as close to state music as a piece not actually the national anthem could be, and which cleverly merged spiky modern fugue with a stately theme from Purcell himself. In the same way, his many songs and adapted folk ...”

“... and Economics. After an interruption in his studies due to war service in the RAF, the dashing young socialist was elected President of the Oxford Union in 1947 and, within three years, became Labour candidate in a by-election in Bristol South East. He was literally returned to Westminster. Jad Adams has written a much needed biography, largely based on ...”

“... treated by the king as equals, as brothers. Unfortunately, I later discovered that that famous Arthur, king of Britain, was not a true story, only a legend; and so I abandoned him for other, more historical kings (in my opinion legends were childish). These are quite different registers. Quigly, though she was English, goes for a voice that has hints of ...”

“... instantly’. Kennedy said that David Cecil’s biography of Lord Melbourne, which depicted young aristocrats having a good time while performing heroic feats in the service of Queen and country, was one of his favourite books. When Kennedy was about to run for the Senate, according to Dallek, he ‘reluctantly’ decided that it would be good politics ...”

“... a limit to what she can achieve’ as a writer, is more debatable. Born in 1882, the young Virginia Stephen grew up in a society in which service, either giving or receiving it, was the defining relationship of domestic life, particularly for women. By 1850, Light tells us, 80 per cent of servants were female and they were mostly answerable to ...”