“... rug and scooping up ‘a handful of faeces like a guilty child’. In his new biography, Jeffrey Meyers quotes one of the two alleged witnesses denying all knowledge of ‘this nonsensical story’. Although he thinks that Maugham’s career boils down to a ‘struggle between sexual repression and artistic expression’, Meyers – a fantastically ...”

“... at Bafta. These sorry occasions have always been best forgotten; now their memory must be kept green against the possible arrival of the men in white coats. 19 January. Watch a video of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the first time, I think, that I have watched it all the way through since I saw it as a child at a cinema in ...”

“... elders have his blood. Their fate is in their veins. In the eyes of the mob, the gutter press, the green-ink subscribers to Hatebook and the spite chorus that dances on reputation, they will soon be reckoned fair game: one false move, one barney in a Croxteth pub, one liaison with a granny of the night. These creatures irresistibly recall another unusual ...”

“... to the work he did during the Examiner period. And the editors of these volumes, Greg Kucich and Jeffrey Cox, have done a superb job of setting it in context, offering a compelling re-evaluative essay by way of an introduction, and prefacing every article with a detailed explanatory note. These articles cover all the major issues of the Regency ...”

“... trans woman, Maura. It won the big prizes, despite criticism for the casting of a non-trans actor, Jeffrey Tambor, as Maura; Tambor was later obliged to quit the show over allegations of sexual harassment.Back in 2006, the head of Disney, Bob Iger, flicked the money switch and bought Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm, capping the spree off in 2019 with the purchase ...”

“... at the Whitney. Complex negotiations are entered into with minders and middlemen. I thought of Jeffrey Smalldon’s account of running across Corso in the Kettle of Fish, how the occasion rapidly degenerated into rows over lottery tickets and a chance meeting with a ‘tall, slender’ gent in a sinister ‘European-cut suit’. ‘Mafioso, man, heavy ...”

“... ideal situation, with the lavender bank just coming into bloom and the trees and grass fresh and green after a week or two of rain. It’s one of the perfect places of the earth, utterly silent and private, the twitter of a hawk the only sound. And it’s the last time we shall be able to come. It’s a warm afternoon and with no one around I swim dutifully ...”

“... reprinted. For this, the justly famous Bennett can have got no royalties, no curtain calls, no green-rooms cries of ‘Darling!’ His reward was the special, monkish sense of release that you get from embracing a discipline, from doing your bit to transcribe the codex. The paper’s monastic air of frugality would be called its bottom line if there were a ...”

“... with many of the poets in Michael Schmidt’s anthology, for though Peter Scupham, Jeremy Hooker, Jeffrey Wainwright, Dick Davies and John Ash are all highly talented and painstaking artists, they seem to be fashioning their poems for themselves and each other. As Auden and Eliot showed, ‘difficult’ poetry can still be popular, but to secure the ordinary ...”

“... you see his blindness, though his back is turned. Mists rise around him, and veil the sides of the green forests; earth is dank and fresh with dews, the ‘grey dawn and the Pleiades before him dance’’ and in the distance are seen the blue hills and sullen ocean. Nothing was ever more finely conceived or done. It breathes the spirit of the morning; its ...”

“... Nellie, a name-form that peaked in the 1880s and 1890s. Orthography became important: Geoffrey or Jeffrey, Ann or Anne, Stephen or Steven. Girls’ names were especially given to whim and proliferation. In the 1930s, my mother was christened Doreen because a Russian acquaintance of my grandfather said that was the name of the nicest girl he had ever ...”

“... bedspread: ‘It was definitely not pink. You know what? I remember John telling me it was green.’ It’s as if the more globalised everything becomes, the more microscopically we gaze on vanished local landscapes; the more we live online, the more we fetishise traces of the predigital world. All the Beatles’ early lives in Liverpool are ...”

“... bracelet 24 hours a day. She wore it for two and a half years, until she was finally issued a green card. She was never given any justification for her treatment, which was common for Muslims regardless of gender, age or class. Together they supplied a steady stream of scapegoats to keep Americans believing they were in perpetual danger – and that only ...”

“... that it has added pride within the town and is being used extensively.All the lights were green, except the one marked ‘flood risk’. The Environment Agency was sceptical. In a letter to the council in September 2013, before Newton went public with his plans, an EA official called Rob Millbank warned that no houses built on the site should have ...”

“... or by Kingsley or Harrison Ainsworth, or even by the much despised and now completely forgotten Jeffrey Farnol, whose daintiness deeply offended me, I would pick up, and starting on page 1, I would race through it as fast as my eyes could carry me, until some demand, like washing my hands, or getting ready to go out, forced me to put it down, and any other ...”