“... new set of rules without taking sufficient account of the separate struggle playing out below the Mason-Dixon Line. The focus of Southern fears was labour legislation. Plans to strengthen the bargaining position of labour unions and extend the minimum wage were fiercely resisted by many Southern Democrats, who rightly saw that organised labour posed the ...”

“... 2 of ‘Prufrock’) and Thomas Hardy’s ‘forms there flung/Against the sky’ (‘The Abbey Mason’); between ‘certain half-deserted streets’ (line 4 of ‘Prufrock’) and ‘he sought out a certain street and number’ in Chapter 20 of Little Dorrit; or, moving beyond literature, between that phrase and the recording of a payment made to ...”

“... does not include the 29th Ode of the Third Book of Horace (‘Happy the Man’) chosen by H.A. Mason to write on as an example of the poet-translator at his most genuinely inspired. Critics do and should differ, where an art is alive to them. But there may be something exceptional in Dryden’s case. He is plainly the most uneven of all our major ...”

“... interviewer. Byatt very often says yes. She says yes to the Paris Review interviewer (her friend Philip Hensher) when he asks whether it isn’t Beatrice Nest who is the ‘avenging angel’ of Possession. She takes this up eagerly. She extends herself at once into the figure of Beatrice, an academic trapped in middle age and unaccustomed softness, holding ...”

“... had become friends with many writers, especially Mordecai Richler; now Moore became friends with Philip Roth and Neil Simon. They divided their time between Manhattan and Long Island. Moore won prizes, sold movie rights and began to achieve a sort of fame, but he lived in those years in a world he grew to distrust: ‘I lived in Greenwich Village ... and I ...”

“... of ‘real journalists, not just celebrity columnists’. The Battle had its big names too: Paul Mason from Newsnight, Suzanne Moore from the Mail on Sunday, the novelist Philip Hensher. Some people refuse to stand on an IoI platform, considering them clandestine and creepy. Others are a bit doubtful, but take part in the ...”