“... wilderness renamed is still a wilderness,’ writes Lawson-Peebles in apparent agreement with John Quincy Adams and Joseph Hall, both of whom had scorned the ‘edenic’ fables told about the West. But is it? Yes, in the sense that you can still starve or freeze or get eaten in it. But we’re talking about writing and reading here. To an audience ...”

“... Pollock was distancing himself from Benton. Some time in the late Thirties he began to frequent John Graham, that most mysterious of all the gurus of European Modernism. Graham took him up, reinforcing his faith in unconscious imagery. From now on, Pollock transferred his admiration and his envy to Picasso, enlarging his ambition to a world scale. Guernica ...”

“... in Belloc’s poem, ‘not before/Becoming an appalling bore’ himself. His war had begun, like Guy Crouchback’s in the ‘Sword of Honour’ trilogy, as a crusade against the forces of atheism and modernism; he was a bit old for service, but he was courageous, and, even when sober, enthusiastic for the cause. Unfortunately, his fellow officers in the ...”

“... other consists (or did in 1971) of playgoers for whom the theatre has never been the same since John Osborne, and if they don’t like a play they leave it in droves. Indeed, it sometimes seems that their chief pleasure in going to the theatre in Brighton is in leaving it, and leaving it as noisily as possible. In Beyond the Fringe the seats were going up ...”

“... there’). There is a letter to the Sunday Times correcting the suggestion that Auden had snubbed Guy Burgess when he was in disgrace. It was true, Auden said, that he had been out when Burgess called, but that was all. ‘It would be dishonourable of me to deny a friendship because the party in question has become publicly notorious.’ There is a ...”

“... press, Parliament and public for the first time since emancipation. Eyre’s critics were led by John Stuart Mill, his supporters by the likes of Carlyle and Ruskin. But the issue for Mill and liberal opinion was the legality of the punitive actions, not the source of the protest, which was the social, political and economic oppression of the majority black ...”

“... profession and the other asylums of London (especially Hoxton) when necessary. Lamb’s brother John had urged him not to take on this task: it was typical of Lamb to say that he understood John’s reasons for saying this, and thought no less of him for it, while disregarding his advice. The history of the fate of insane ...”

“... aural shortcomings here are not an isolated instance in his work and bother even his admirers. For John Lucas, who admires Porter’s savage attacks on metropolitan manners, verbal clumsiness is simply the price to be paid for Porter’s fecundity and invention – the cost of weariness after years at the typewriter bashing the smoothies. For others perhaps ...”

“... seen. Not a few of the characters the boom brought with it were larger than life too: ex-Governor John Connally of Texas, for example, still scarred from the Kennedy shooting, hustling for oil companies and on the way down to the bankruptcy that broke him, and T. Boone Pickens, the greenmail king, so thrilled with his acquisition of the Mesa field (which he ...”

“... or the bizarre hysterically whipping up into nightmare and nonsense (as in his description of John Lennon’s decline: ‘bed-ins, bag-ins, be-ins, in-ins’). But the effect of his often brilliant verbal delirium is to make things wordy and unreal, language warding off the experience it describes, whisking it away. So Hoolihan implausibly combines the ...”

“... I don’t think he means to demonise Craft, tempted though biographers must be to find a fall guy (Humphrey Carpenter’s Britten biography found Peter Pears). But much of the original matter in Walsh’s new volume was supplied by the composer’s immediate family (particularly his grandson, John Stravinsky), who ...”

“... the remains of Josef Mengele and giving congressional testimony about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, among other high-profile cases. He died nine years ago, but the colourful interviews and writings he left behind enable Hagerty to provide a substantial account. In 1984, Snow, a chain-smoker in cowboy boots, was invited to Argentina by the ...”

“... have a memory of sitting there and feeling smug,’ she wrote of attending a class taught by John Crowe Ransom in 1938. She identified as a Trotskyite, placing herself on the anti-Stalinist left along with the writers she admired: Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy.Hardwick wanted to flee to New York, like ‘a provincial in Balzac, yearning ...”

“... War movement was the same man who had, half a century before, hounded Emma Goldman and John Reed and, later, put Leon Trotsky under surveillance in Mexico. This longevity makes Hoover’s biography a wonderful subject. Powers’s book is painfully neutral and somewhat pedestrian at times, but his authoritative command of his sources makes it ...”

“... undescribed in 1987, when it was made, and not often since. For example: ‘You’re the kind of guy who’d fuck someone up the ass and not do them the courtesy of a reach-around.’ 3 July. Silly programme on Timewatch last night attempting to rehabilitate Haig. (‘Acid-bath Haigh?’ ‘No. Blood-bath Haig.’) It was just historians playing see-saw with ...”