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“... reader a recognisable stock character. This is Ronald Reagan, here renamed President O’Reilly. (David Lodge’s version, ‘Ronald Ruck’, was funnier.) D.M. Thomas offers a farcical interview with President O’Reilly in which the old man is so confused that he can only answer the question before the last:     ‘What is your outlook on ...”

“... to the category of purely inventive or observant novelists, like Balzac or Dickens (setting aside David Copperfield). Plot invention, in particular, was never his forte: Le Rouge et le Noir derived from two separate causes célèbres, La Chartreuse from an untrustworthy 16th-century account of the youthful escapades of Pope Paul III, and Lucien Leuwen was ...”

“... strange configurations, but that the dance releases no one. This is not always a comic perception. King Lear is also mentioned in the book (‘One that gathers samphire, dreadful trade. The boy gets nicknamed Samphire by his more highbrow clients because he’s dreadful trade’), and the wheel in that play is a rack. Clive James’s title comes from Yeats: I ...”

“... rental bungalows, a footnote in the biographies of T.E. Lawrence, Beaverbrook and Mackenzie King, and the villain in lachrymose ‘decline of Britain’ books and television series. I think by the end of the Seventies only the Hannay books and one or two others were still in print. The charges against John Buchan were either false (as with ...”

“... Killer. A white man scalped. A white man disappeared, a white boy kidnapped. It was Biblical, David v. Goliath. But Wilson was disturbed by that.’ It’s a way of writing that recalls the staccato beat of three-dot journalism, and Alexie’s reliance on it suggests that he is trying to put everything simply and clearly, so that readers don’t make the ...”

“... are admirable and even beautiful. But they function as a biological equivalent to Burger King or Microsoft; they threaten to become transnational monopolies that force out the local versions. Indeed, you can see the one as a by-product of the other: the industrialised world that creates garbage, cities and shipping (which often transmits the weedy ...”

“... that surrounded his reputation both in his own day and afterwards, as reflected in the 1962 David Lean biopic, presenting him as the romantic hero – tall, blue-eyed, in flowing robes – he always wanted to be. His failures are familiar to anyone who has taken any serious interest in him, and were only too painfully known to himself. He either led or ...”

“... and history, wore nail polish and borrowed his sister’s fun-fur jacket. He took Deborah to hear David Bowie and Lou Reed, and read her Oscar Wilde, Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn. He showed her a ring binder containing sections labelled ‘Lyrics’ and ‘Novel’. ‘I felt privileged that he had trusted me enough to let me see the extent of his ...”

“... Ukraine). He belonged to a family of Polonised Jewish landowners, and as his new biographer David Hayton notes, was uncircumcised. The family had been called Niemirowski, but this surname was dropped as part of the enforced Germanisation of Jewish surnames in the later 18th century. His parents classed themselves as Roman Catholics, though organised ...”

“... and, if Trump got elected, there would be a third volume provisionally titled ‘The Return of the King’.) ‘I think he’s the greatest poet of our generation,’ the man said.‘Why?’ I asked.‘I think he has done more to call attention to the use of the English language than anybody else in our time and he has been more creative with the ...”

“... and textually. His model of the poet is not classical, but Biblical: not Orpheus, but Solomon and David, the two chief authors of what Sidney described (conventionally) as ‘the poetical part of the Scripture’. Those Biblical models were the foundation of what has been called a ‘Protestant poetics’, which shaped English poetry from Sidney and Spenser ...”

“... and political platform for Labour, has been elaborated with the help of Tony Blair’s adviser, David Miliband, and sees Blair’s election as leader as an epochal event, finally settling Labour’s commitment to social democracy. All of which sounds very much as if Hutton hopes to become a key adviser in a future Blair administration, though the Tories may ...”

“... but a Tory government nor by the sound of it ever wants to. At Birmingham I have a session with David Edgar’s playwrights’ class, then do another ‘Our Alan’ performance for a more general audience. 26 January. Run into Tristram Powell. Andrew Devonshire (sic) has done a diary for the Spectator mentioning the memoir of Julian Jebb (edited by ...”

“... nothing was said about his treasonable conduct in the American struggle, and his vituperation of King George, though English law did not recognise, in principle, a subject’s right to divest himself of his allegiance. When he had to make a hasty getaway to France it was because Part One of The Rights was deemed subversive. In Revolutionary France his ...”

“... mostly took Hemingway at his macho word and accepted the Life magazine image of him as a bearded king. It took the shock of his suicide to show the thin ice on which his sovereignty stood, and the black depths below.) Despite the formal and practical advantages of waiting, financially it is better to strike while the body is still warm. Editors and agents ...”