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“... a novel that invokes Cyril Connolly’s dictum in Enemies of Promise about the pram in the hall – as ‘a toy for her lover’. In Hazzard’s fiction there are very few children, and the ones who do appear are not particularly rewarding. But they are not the enemy. The enemy is the person who sees others as playthings. The enemy is the writer.At the ...”

“... His Teens’, Melville intrudes directly to caution the reader – much in the manner of Henry James in Portrait of a Lady, on behalf of the romantically youthful Isabel Archer – not precipitously to judge someone destined to suffer unduly. Paragraphs in which his characters are allowed to exult in their situations tend to conclude with dropped hints of ...”

“... at least in Protestant accounts. Greater notice is taken of the plaudits of the chronicler Edward Hall and of the (qualified) gratitude of the martyrologist John Foxe. Yet there has been an alternative tradition in Henrician historiography, and not only on the Catholic side. Beside Shakespeare’s tribute to Henry stands Sir Walter Ralegh’s protest: ‘if ...”

“... flaubertising in the foreground, the background originally held the figure of the model Jerry Hall breastfeeding her baby. She sat thus for several months, until one day she called in sick. When, a couple of days later, she was still unfit to pose, the enraged Freud painted over her face and inserted that of his long-time assistant David Dawson. But the ...”

“... Giving offence has become an unfashionable sport, but Kingsley Amis belongs in its hall of fame, one of the all-time greats. When Roger Micheldene, the central character in his 1963 novel, One Fat Englishman, is warned that he’s about to say something he’ll be sorry for, he replies, ‘those are the only things I really enjoy saying’ – and there isn’t much sign that Micheldene or his creator did feel sorry afterwards ...”

“... projected eleven-play cycle. ‘I took it as my credo,’ Wilson wrote, ‘and sought to answer James Baldwin’s call for a profound articulation of the Black tradition that could sustain a man once he left his father’s house.’With what he called his ‘anthropological eye’, Wilson set out to dramatise the ‘dazed and dazzling … rapport with ...”

“... The magistrate was unable to grant him the warrant, however, and he referred Fogle to the St James parish authorities, whose duty it was to see that an inquest was held on any person who had died suddenly. But the parish had no record of Crachami’s death, and all Fogle’s attempts to find Gilligan proved unsuccessful. On arrival at Gilligan’s ...”

“... impossible figure, but he could pretend to be him, act the part as it might be played on a music-hall stage, and in the process become something else, something more interesting and possibly even something new – synthetic not only in the sense of ‘inauthentic’ but in a dialectical sense, too. Ziggy Stardust is an archetype of the popstar that has ...”

“... resignation, there were two further, short-lived secretaries of state for war (Joseph Godber and James Ramsden). Within a year Harold Wilson’s incoming Labour government had abolished the post altogether, amalgamating its duties into the Ministry of Defence. Profumo killed off his job at the same time that he was destroying his own career. What Profumo ...”

“... journal – and the reactionary Anti-Jacobin Reviewpraised it. Clare was received at Milton Hall by the Fitzwilliams, who gave him money and advice, as well as blankets and other comforts for his parents. The family would provide Clare with financial assistance for the rest of his life. He also visited Burghley House, where he was kindly received by the ...”

“... Centre, an umbrella organisation that included a mosque, a clinic, a kindergarten, a festival hall and a headquarters for an alms committee; with the occupier’s approval he was soon receiving considerable funds from the Gulf. In the mid-1980s, the military governor of Gaza gave a succinct summary of Israel’s relationship to Yassin: ‘The Israeli ...”

“... fuck you up, your mum and dad’ recited by a thousand Girl Guides in the Royal Albert Hall.12 January. Read Macbeth for maybe the second time in my life (and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it). Much of the language is as opaque as I generally find Shakespeare but I’m struck by how soon he gets down to business, so that within a scene the play ...”

“... had availed himself of some of those techniques in L’Étranger, whose deadpan style owed much to James Cain’s noir The Postman Always Rings Twice. Coming from a country where rationing was still in effect, he was unnerved by America’s enormous wealth, but even more unnerved by what struck him as its blissful amnesia: ‘This great country, calm and ...”

“... at the Sainte-Trinité: ‘Everything from the “devil” in the bass to Radio City Music Hall harmonies in the treble. Why the Church allows it during service is a mystery.’ In fact, Messiaen was forced to draft an apology for having shocked the ‘old ladies’ attending church. But ‘to those who bellow about my so-called dissonances’, he ...”

“... looking for Irish traditional music as an ingredient of his own musical recreation of [James] Joyce’s work, and when he was told that Joe Heaney was “the king of Irish music”, he pursued him to Norwich, where Joe was on tour, and swept him off to IRCAM’s prestigious base, the Centre Pompidou’.The remote​ west of Ireland, so used to ...”