“... and beautiful’), starting early and returning late: ‘we climbed part way up a hill and lay in the grass for a couple of hours in the sun eating candy and talking.’ Eileen had no axe to grind, which made her a rare bird among the expats in Barcelona and may have accounted for her charm in Charles and Lois’s eyes. For all their zeal, they were a ...”

“... confrontation with slow-burning loss (‘I came to grief late in life’ are the opening words) of Paul Bailey’s Gabriel’s Lament. There’s no mention in Porter’s book of those five stages, and the idea of ‘moving on’ from grief doesn’t get much of a look in. When friends (those unreal people, murmuring soothing advice into a smoking ...”

“... pals from choir or band or football club, labouring brothers, are induced to volunteer. They lay down the plough, the blacksmith’s hammer, the slaughterman’s knife. Intoxicated with blood-and-flag rhetoric, tales of atrocities committed by a bestial enemy, they willingly march off. Dreams of posthumous glory. A memorial in the village church. The ...”

“... cries Louie … confessing to his young son the shabby sexual adventure that he engaged in as she lay on her deathbed: ‘That may mean, will mean, little or nothing to you, my only child, reading this document.’ To Bellow, it meant everything. Again, the stylistic equivalent of an operatic curtain, coming down grandly on a fiasco. Used in a context as ...”

“... a girl with a hand-knit tourie. Throughout the boat, muzak was playing. Old Christmas hits. Paul McCartney. The only place you could avoid it was a lounge with subdued lighting and big reclining chairs. There were prints on the walls, a set of three, showing a cartoon sea with a stripy lighthouse, a fishing-boat, and below the blue waves, three ...”

“... the largest in Africa – wheeled about to tackle the Eritreans. As it advanced, Soviet gunboats lay off the coast and shelled the Eritrean fighters evacuating Massawa. The Eritreans called it a ‘strategic withdrawal’, but more than 25 years later one of them admitted to Wrong that ‘it was a complete defeat, a defining moment.’ The very prospect of ...”

“... As Louis MacNeice lay dying in 1963, his last major work, a radio play called Persons from Porlock, was broadcast by the BBC. It is about a painter called Hank, who starts well in the 1930s, but whose development, as MacNeice explains in a note, ‘is interrupted by the war . . . Subsequent interruptions and frustrations include those occasioned by the lure of commercial art, by drink, money troubles and women ...”

“... of unpaid mortgages and obesity. Luckily for him, he had little idea of how much blubber lay ahead.Suburbia was central to Updike’s battle map as a novelist because it’s where the eros could be waged in close quarters with access to actual trees and picnic grounds for gulps of fresh air, whereas free love in Greenwich Village or some San ...”

“... one of Cumberland’s officers remarked, ‘but it was vain, they could not penetrate, and lay in Heaps.’ This ‘macabre deadlock’, as O’Keeffe calls it, lasted for perhaps half an hour before government reinforcements arrived to tip the balance. The Jacobite survivors of the crossfire began to retreat and then to run. On the left of the ...”

“... taboo’. In his essay on Knight, Michael Taylor quotes the critic on the political theology that lay behind his poses – the thought that ‘the religious importance of literature’ should be proclaimed ‘in a voice of authority’ – and concludes that this phrase can be used to ‘sum up the direction and impact’ of his work. Knight’s entrée into ...”

“... forward by Southern senators in the lead-up to the Civil War. They believed the American future lay in alliances with the slave states of Cuba and Brazil. Only by ending the slave trade, thereby insulating themselves against British ambitions, could ideal slave societies flourish. These societies would reproduce slaves from the existing ...”

“... less important as a signifier of classiness. (I was pleased to discover that, 23 years apart, Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono both chose John Lennon’s ‘Beautiful Boy’ as their favourite record.)Despite its slightly lacklustre start, Desert Island Discs picked up a following and ran for 67 episodes before being mothballed in 1946 after BBC radio was ...”

“... replaced by the editors of Granta and Varsity, who had an eye on Fleet Street and were keener on lay-out than content, and by producers and actors determined to storm the RSC. He writes with sense and sensitivity of the student unrest which, in the Sixties and early Seventies, changed the relations between dons and undergraduates. But does he not think it ...”

“... Another such issue is whether 18th-century England may properly be called, as in the title of Paul Langford’s recent book, ‘a polite and commercial people’: a title which draws from Thompson the observation that ‘historical conferences on 18th-century questions tend to be places where the bland lead the bland.’ It’s hard nowadays to think of ...”

“... terrible simplificateur, a Hitler writ small. Kater also introduces us to travelling salesman Paul Gillgasch, who struggled to pay his district party’s telephone bills from the sale of razor blades and portraits of the Führer. This is the familiar world of the Spiesser. But Kater also shows that, especially in the years 1930-33, the Nazis started to ...”