“... theatre,’ he wrote, ‘or that the stage is the mightiest of modern engines?’ James’s play Guy Domville opened at St James’s Theatre on 5 January, and was also produced by George Alexander, who obtained the rights to The Importance of Being Earnest only because the James play had failed. On the opening night of his play, James had ‘the luminous ...”

“... words of a celebrated American defence attorney, Gerald Shargel, talking to the New Yorker: ‘The guy can be guilty as hell, but if I win an acquittal it means there was something infirm or wrong with the prosecution’s case, and they weren’t entitled to the conviction.’ On their view, the acquittal even of hardened and violent criminals whose liberty ...”

“... immigrant Jewish community. Although he dropped the name Abraham in the Forties, inside his tough guy persona was a Jewish boy – like the one murdered by fellow drifters in his first published story, ‘So Help Me’ – struggling not to come out. Like his 1935 proletarian novel, Somebody in Boots, ‘So Help Me’ drew on Algren’s travels through the ...”

“... and newspaper headline, impression and chronicle. For the middlebrow modernism of U.S.A., John Dos Passos shrewdly kept those registers apart, offering them separately on the page under the headings camera eye and newsreel. Here they are mashed together, and the effect is distinctly lumpy. There’s a reference to Firbank late in the book and perhaps ...”

“... of the City of London. In 1603, a quarter of a century after bricks began to be manufactured here, John Stow described its buildings as ‘filthy cottages’. Since then, the area, whether one calls it Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets, Banglatown, has been a byword for poverty and violence. ‘A land of blood and beer,’ a rector of Hawksmoor’s ...”

“... the nation that existed between Margaret Thatcher’s ‘there’s no such thing as society’ and John Major’s ‘it’s time to understand a bit less and condemn a bit more.’ I felt for the boy being led away but also for the boys leading him, and I believed there was not only a terrible death beyond what we could see there, but lives too, the life of a ...”

“... became the craze – first for women, somewhat later for men. Gender outlaws, take note: tough-guy-hipster-fedora-favourers – Al Capone, Humphrey Bogart, J. Edgar Hoover, William S. Burroughs, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Depp – might all be considered unwitting imitators of Sarah Bernhardt.) 5. The Rampant (er … ) Erotomania. (One moment, Herr Doktor ...”

“... but was a blockbuster bestseller, popping to number one on the fiction list just ahead of John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. We shall never see the noble likes of such bestseller lists again. Twenty years after his debut with Dangling Man (1944), after an already notable run that included The Adventures of Augie March (his ...”

“... herself; the trouble was that Peters did too.In the autumn of 1973, Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, had approached Warner Bros offering to write a new version of A Star Is Born. The original film from 1937 and its 1954 remake with Judy Garland had been set in Hollywood, but Didion and Dunne wanted to explore the music industry. Several ...”

“... New Wave. The line-up included a geeky white dude in joke-shop doctor’s scrubs, a muscly black guy with a dyed mohican, and two unlikely-looking white women (lesbians to boot, it turned out). Prince was having big fun with the play of appearances, abandoning strict reverence to any supposedly ‘authentic’ truth of what it is to be black, or male, or ...”

“... store. On midsummer’s night in 1955 a tall, broad-shouldered farmer 17 years her senior, John Warren, took her to the stock car racing, and a year later, when Wendy was 21, they got married. John Warren rented 175 acres from the local squire in Dunton Bassett, a village in the south-west of the county. He’d been ...”

“... McLaren would have picked up the Situationist sensibility not by reading – the main texts, Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle for one, weren’t available in English translation until the 1970s – but by fraternising with King Mob and seeing photographs of the thought-bomb graffiti that proliferated in Paris in May 1968. Some of these utopian ...”

“... Letters, his work was still overseen by the family. ‘I remember removing a letter dealing with Guy Domville from the Selected Letters,’ Edel wrote, ‘because Billy James’ – another nephew – ‘found it too sad.’ Between 1974 and 1984 Edel published a four-volume edition that included 1100 letters, noting that ‘the large James archives in many ...”

“... and that so rudely that he solos immediately, sputtering and complaining loudly like an ordinary guy but through a plunger-mute: why don’t somebody give a poor ol’ trombonist a hand or seat? In ‘John Hardy’s Wife’, the characteristically smooth ensemble performance is suddenly interrupted by the ...”