“... buying Penguin Books’ American branch. The two men crossed the pond for talks with Alan [sic] Lane. Epstein was not impressed. He decided that Lane, ‘like most British publishers’, was in hock to his bankers. The penguin would never fly. Epstein went home to the skyscrapers, where a publisher could spread his ...”

“... studies fixture. It established her as a standard-bearer for the ‘new British realism’, in David Forrest’s phrase: an attempt to build on Ken Loach’s dialectical or discursive approach to the social and political realities of working-class life by developing a more ‘poetic’ or ‘phenomenological’ emphasis. The phenomenology has been thought ...”

“... we know what sort of film this is, and we wait and see. It Follows, written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, offers an extraordinary mixture of over and under-statement, with almost nothing in between. In the scene I have just described, and indeed throughout the movie, the soundtrack, composed by an outfit called Disasterpeace, crashes and thumps ...”

“... staff as ‘stock’ – ‘as if he was a stallholder selling ladies’ underwear in Petticoat Lane’: an unfortunate jibe when we remember where the Waddle money went. And yet else-where Venables is said to be habitually reluctant to turn stock into ready cash, even when the stock has had its day: ‘Like all managers, he liked to have lots of players ...”

“... sister had only been living there a short while, after Pym’s retirement from her post in Fetter Lane as assistant editor of Africa; and it was Larkin’s first and, as it turned out, his only visit. After her years in the wilderness, Pym’s novel Quartet in Autumn had at last been accepted for publication: Larkin and ...”

“... visitation complaints and defamation suits, and the answers have always been ‘it all depends.’ David Cressy’s excellent book suggests a different approach, examining conflicts over ritual and offering stories rather than statistics. Despite Coverdale, Gouge and the Admonition, a wedding was not only a religious ceremony, but the culmination of weeks or ...”

“... been perceived as being more fun’ than Lehmann.) In 1940, at the suggestion of Allen Lane, who unlike most publishers at that time had a large paper allocation, New Writing became Penguin New Writing. Wright sympathetically conjures up the blacked-out, hemmed-in Britain where the magazine found an immediate welcome and settled down to sell 75,000 ...”

“... It was only a matter of time before London beckoned, in the shape of Sheridan’s theatre at Drury Lane. Long before the decade was out, Mrs Jordan had become to comedy what Mrs Siddons was to tragedy. She was well-paid, and the talk and the toast of metropolitan Whig society. She also encountered the second villain of her life, one Richard Ford, by whom she ...”

“... gratifying that people die while watching it, round and round for ever, in an endless loop. David Foster Wallace always had trouble finishing his novels. And yet he put in this one a thought so absorbing and delightful that you could easily imagine yourself, like the rat in the experiment, pressing the lever over and over. ‘Thousands of times an ...”

“... Now comes Scott Hicks’s Shine, an equally arty but commercially viable biopic about a man – David Helfgott (played by Geoffrey Rush, Noah Taylor and Alex Rafalowicz) – who is abnormally inarticulate. Helfgott’s very first words are: ‘Kissed them all, I kissed them all, always kissed cats, puss-cats, kissed them, always did; if a cat’d let me ...”

“... French – still searching for an English publisher), Richard Schickel’s D. W. Griffith and now David Robinson’s Chaplin. All have one vital quality in common, and are preceded in this respect by Alexander Walker’s book on Garbo: they depend far less upon books of film history than upon first-class and first-hand research. Instead of a furtive glance at ...”

“... years after the event. And perhaps she was right, though that cannot be the reason for their son, David Profumo, once more resurrecting it. Presumably he needed to get it out of his system. Whatever his reasons, he tries to discover in this well-crafted memoir, which is effectively a joint biography of his parents and himself – a difficult undertaking ...”

“... efforts, but Boswell conducted his business in a state of perfect confidence. He may have been, as David Hume remarked, ‘very good-humoured, very agreeable and very mad’, but he knew exactly what his talents were, and he drove them home. He wanted to be able to imagine Johnson in every conceivable human situation, and he would provoke him, and set him ...”

“... horizontality’ reaches its conclusion in the City of London, which boasts the Golden Lane Estate, constructed in the late 1950s with the Cité radieuse very much in mind; and, of course, the Barbican. Community – ‘universal linkage’, in Fourier’s phrase – has long been the corridor’s most charismatic meaning, its noblest latent ...”

“... David Bindman does not think that Hogarth was joking when he gave one of his contemporaries, John Nichols, a comic demonstration of minimalism: it took the form of a diagram composed of three lines and he claimed that it contained his memory of ‘a Sergeant with his pike going into an Ale House, and his Dog following ...”