“... People must not do things for fun,’ joked A.P. Herbert. ‘We are not here for fun. There is no reference to fun in any Act of Parliament.’ From its grey, drizzly cover to its century-long plod of standard-length excerpts, Brian MacArthur’s anthology leaves you in no doubt: there’s precious little fun to be had protesting ...”

“... out. Almost at once they were called home. War brings rare excitement for writers of bestsellers. Somerset Maugham dabbled in spying, in Switzerland and Russia; Compton Mackenzie became director of the Aegean Intelligence Service; Hugh Walpole ran the Anglo-Russian Propaganda Bureau in revolutionary Petrograd; A.E.W. Mason, who had been a Liberal MP, was ...”

“... rickshaws. My father-in-law, a former aide-de-camp in the Indian army, spoke like a character in a Somerset Maugham novel. Never having shared a household with servants, I often felt that I was being unwittingly cast in some half-remembered scene from Upstairs, Downstairs. The Sky Room on Park Street featured a menu that might have been taken from a Soho ...”

“... shares Lawrence’s compulsive need to put his characters down. With Wilson as with Kipling we are all in the same boat – in fact, one of Kipling’s titles. Wilson marshals the inner life of his characters like a conductor encouraging an orchestra, and the composition is always superbly organised. He orchestrates human wickedness, his own ...”

“... jerk. It did the same the other week while I was reading the personal ads in Private Eye. In what we may as well call ‘the old days’ there used occasionally to be coded pleas from girls needing money for an abortion. Nowadays they’re advertising for everything, and requesting sums it’s less easy to unravel. In this issue of the Eye, for ...”

“... among the influences reviewers have detected as informing All the Devils Are Here. They offered W.G. Sebald, Seabrook snorts. He’s no melancholy walker. There is nothing ambiguous about the photographs he hammers into his texts. They are pure archive, filched from tabloid libraries: Freddie Mills posing in his trunks (low angle, hard shadows), the ...”

“... He instructed one of his agents not to come home until ‘India is completely ransacked as far as we possibly can for literature and other objects of interest connected with ancient medicine.’ The more he acquired, the higher the stakes seemed to become. Wellcome, who had begun his business career by marketing invisible ink, insisted that his employees ...”

“... suffered from none of the social anxieties that tormented would-be insiders like Hugh Walpole and Somerset Maugham. Adroit, a natural survivor, he used a degree of bisexuality both socially and in his writing. Sado, an impressionistic novel set in Japan, has a hero who is deeply involved both with a young male student and a European woman. The power of ...”

“... dirtiest of four-letter words, especially if grey, or if worn by a BBC boss and cut by Armani. But we have now reached a point where any sensible ram-raider or child-strangler is careful to wear a suit in the dock; and a suit is not unknown at a terrorist’s funeral. It has been an instructive story. For general urban wear, the lounge or business suit dates ...”

“... or knife is needed to cut it. It goes on in the same vein for the next ten pages, during which we still think we are about to discover the experiences that turned the narrator (‘I, who have been ingenuous for far too long’) into a bitter paranoiac. Little by little we come to ...”

“... of values was conducive to a single culture, a single society – and a single nation’. Can we really assume that because some labouring men and women adhered to these ‘Victorian values’, the majority did so? Can we indeed believe that Victorian England possessed a consensual value-system, and that all sectors ...”

“... by lust, bibelots, furniture and glamour, society and jewels.In November 1947, Channon dined with Somerset Maugham. ‘We discussed diaries and Willie Maugham volunteered that mine, if I presented them, would be the most illuminating. Others who keep them are too ...”

“... Africa is large; I have a gun, plenty of ammunition, 600 men who are devoted to me heart and soul. We will create an empire in Africa, a strong impregnable empire … They will never dare to attack me. When France wants to negotiate with us, it will need to pay us dear. Chanoine, equally compromised, threw his lot in with Voulet. The other French officers ...”

“... icons has surely struck more than one visiting gaijin. Japan is both closer and further than we think: it returns our language and traditions oddly transformed, yet to us many of its own categories are mysterious, if not invisible. This blend of the familiar and strange may explain our tendency to seize upon Japan as the very image of the ...”

“... Hall, a real-estate speculator and writer, and Mike Chase. Neither man shot his weapon (later we learn that Hall carried a 44 special action; Chase a 455 Webley; Burroughs loves guns). Both died simultaneously by rifle-fire from an unknown third party. Hall, it is reported, wrote under the pen-name and in the person of Kim Carsons, the famous Western ...”