“... from the rest of the world. This can go too far. Some of her narration has a stunned, Janet-and-John quality. But the restaurant served only beer and wine, so they left. Carol did not stop anywhere for her drink as they drove back towards New York. Carol asked her if she wanted to go home or come out to Carol’s house for a while, and Therese said to ...”

“... business of rewriting for the actors takes up a lot of time in America. I am still surprised that John Malkovich agreed to play Valmont without having it written in his contract that he didn’t have to die. It would have left him available for Dangerous Liaisons II. Diana Ross, on her way to Paris to make a ‘highly personal’ (auteuriste?) film about ...”

“... is more real than perceived. Yet Hammond is to be found quarrelling even with fellow moderates. John Edmonds in particular is an object of running scorn and antipathy. If, as he claims persuasively, the final expulsion of the union was not the product of the complex and ultimately unimportant Orion deal, but a long-nourished revenge for Wapping, might not ...”

“... and skewed when applied to so sporty and brash a critic as Paulin) to his enterprise is John Clare, whose ‘writing becomes a form of Nation Language beating its head against the walls of urbane, polished Official Standard’. At the heart of Clare’s work for Paulin is not only his social eccentricity – too successful for his own ...”

“... makes Léa give Chéri up for a biologically-appropriate wife. ‘Men,’ man-in-the-news Iron John Bly reports, ‘are more lonesome in every generation.’ In the last few days, as I’ve been getting more and more inflamed in my thoughts about the human (i.e. female, i.e. menopausal) condition, I’ve been hearing a lot about how hard it is being a man ...”

“... is more general than I had supposed, and sometimes it reaches surprising heights: this is from John Fowles’s Shipwreck: ‘No other element has such accreted layers of significance for us, such complex archetypal meaning. The sea’s moods and uses sex it. It is the great creatrix, feeder, womb and vagina, place of pleasure; the gentlest thing on ...”

“... chaps should be doing about Our Times. The Ruthenes have nothing to worry about. As rewritten for John Major’s times, England’s epic is all regression. Gilgamesh is Lewis Carroll in disguise: the Queen of Hearts raves uninterruptedly through 11 sanguinary, doom-sodden chapters, then at the end Alice pops out and tells everybody to behave. Where does ...”

“... Belgrade as Head of the American Mission to Tito. He ended the war as political adviser to General John Harding (of whose XIII Corps in Venezia Giulia pars minor fui), trying to stop young idiots like myself from starting a Third World War. Thus although he missed the early, heroic years of the resistance, he was ideally placed to observe, both in the field ...”

“... almost to the point where it became structurally repetitious: scene after scene involved John Huffam coming into contact with someone who knows more about the plot surrounding him than he does, quizzing them relentlessly about it and then drawing his conclusions with varying degrees of perspicacity, groping his way towards the moment when he might ...”

“... to Italy, where Maestro Sabatini took pupils, among them the Irish tenor and future Papal Count John McCormack. Rafael spent much of his boyhood with his maternal grandparents in Liverpool and always regarded England as his home. At 17 he started work as a clerk in a Liverpool coffee-importing business while writing in his spare time. By the turn of the ...”

“... this cunning and elusive concept. Not everyone would agree, of course. There are those who, like John Betjeman, relish (take an ‘unholy pleasure’ in) the game of social ‘class’. And Marx decided that the situation of the exploited could only be bettered by theorising about ‘class’ – i.e. by envisaging underprivileged workers as a ...”

“... own. Under this heady new influence Jack wrote the story that won him his first publication (in John O’ London’s Weekly) and first fee (six guineas). His first novel to be accepted was also a Saroyanesque essay, Green to Pagan Street, though The Trouble with Harry was published first. By about 1950 he was doing well enough to set up as a full-time ...”

“... political movement. In April 1937 an international commission, headed by the philosopher John Dewey, assembled in Mexico to enquire into the Stalinist charges of conspiracy against Trotsky, and pronounced a verdict totally exonerating him. This was no doubt useful in influencing world opinion in Trotsky’s favour; but a 1938 manifesto signed by ...”

“... suggests a firmer grip on reality. In 1959, while the Massons were living in Montevideo, they met John Levy, ‘an enormously wealthy, irascible, upper-class Englishman’ who was a disciple of the intellectually sophisticated Indian guru Krishnamenon. All the Massons were charmed by Levy, and began to hitch their spiritual wagons to Krishnamenon’s ...”

“... the grain of what became fashionable in American fiction, he shares with Raymond Carver and John Updike and others the feeling that homo erectus americanus, the life of any American male, its slow detail, is of intrinsic interest. His novel, when it appeared in 1991, was both praised and sneered at. His florid style and his long sentences and his great ...”