“... and so it is with the list of writers who have introduced Saki’s work: Noël Coward, A.N. Wilson, Tom Sharpe, Will Self. Coward’s use of Sakian humour, though, is constrained by his urgent pursuit of the next punchline; Sharpe’s has a seaside postcard quality that has dated more in forty years than Saki’s has ...”

“... held for Gilles Deleuze (a ‘Christ among philosophers’). I learned a lot about her from Andrew Wilson’s biography, a book which strikes the right balance between empathy and critical distance. Wilson’s interpretations of her work, however, are often vapid. Can one really take seriously remarks such ...”

“... When Tom Driberg died in August 1976, the Times ran an obituary which, as people used to say, broke with convention. The deceased, bleated the former Thunderer, had been: ‘A journalist, an intellectual, a drinking man, a gossip, a high churchman, a liturgist, a homosexual ...’ There was nothing precisely objectionable about this ...”

“... their original purpose in exclusive cults much like the hallucinogens that he discusses. C. Anne Wilson has traced the strong connections between alchemy, distillation and cultic initiation in her paper ‘Philosophers, Iosis and the Water of Life’, dating the development of wine-distillation to no later than Anaxilos of Larissa (c.40 BC) and placing its ...”

“... enough to care about the missed notes. So it bothers me that a character is described as enjoying Tom Clancy novels during a scene set a dozen years or more before the publication of The Hunt for Red October. It bothers me, too, that the reverb from his characters’ thoughts often screeches through Alexie’s omniscient narration, in a way that can make him ...”

“... the political map of Strathclyde. Breach of Promise, the title of Clive Ponting’s study of Wilson’s governments of the Sixties, evokes, with its suggestion of sordid betrayal, a polarity which dominates structures of feeling within the Labour Movement. The shades of men like Maclean and Maxton whose failure in politics expressed a refusal to ...”

“... Doctor, the Lord, the Spy’ and Profumo himself. The leader of the opposition, Harold Wilson, dubbed them ‘this dingy quadrilateral’, though, as will soon appear, a much dingier quadrilateral was composed of four very different people. The origins of the Profumo family were Sardinian. Jack Profumo’s great-grandfather, who had, the author ...”

“... them, though sometimes, like the protagonists of the ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ / ‘Habetrot’ / ‘Tom Tit Tot’ group of stories, the spineless minxes got supernatural help to slide out of their duties and marry into the aristocracy or even royalty.Husain includes stories of undeniably human witches too. There is a witch who spoils the butter (beer and ...”

“... wars showed how to ‘brew up’ a tank with the aid of Molotov cocktails. Also at Osterley, Tom Wintringham, who had commanded a battalion of the International Brigade in Spain, taught that ‘two or three determined men with a length of tram line or stout iron bar can often [sic] put a tank out of action’ (by thrusting it between track and ...”

“... in this study – not only his rapport with Irish-America, but the influence of President Wilson on his policies and tactics. The belief that Dev’s responsibility for and role in the Civil War were minor is more controversial; and even more so is the claim that the sectarianism of the Constitution was justified because it involved a tacit ...”

“... British writer who matters?’ Not one, he suggests, can stand comparison with Marquez, Kundera, Tom Wolfe. What can the editor of the Independent have made of the claim that the writers praised and published in his pages do not matter? Perhaps he felt that it did not matter that D.J. Taylor felt that British writers do not matter. No doubt he is familiar ...”

“... Larkin and John Wain knew one another at Oxford, but had little to do with autodidacts like Colin Wilson, John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe – this last name less often mentioned in this context than might have been expected, doubtless because Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) was published a little too late to be fitted into the fashionable ...”

“... Similarly, the most popular of the many damning reviews of Rees-Mogg’s book was written by A.N. Wilson, whose biography of Darwin was shown to be full of egregious errors and weird prejudice when it was published in 2017. History is not a reliable scourge; facts do not make for firm friends. Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, the one triumphant in European ...”

“... like a moth beating against a bulb, briefly altering the light. In 1832, Carlyle reviewed John Wilson Croker’s new edition of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, and emphasised, as Hermione Lee has noted, how biography, by recording ‘many a little Reality’, can make the reader see the world as it existed around the central figure, its depths and ...”

“... used by her murderous anti-heroes to kill the clueless people they are in love with: witness Tom Ripley’s brain-splatter of an assault – with an oar – on the pate of pretty Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr Ripley. In Jill Dawson’s vastly entertaining novelistic riff on Highsmith, The Crime Writer (2016), set in the early 1960s, when Highsmith ...”