“... older sister Rita. Rita Lydig – her second husband was a wealthy New York businessman, Philip Lydig – was like one of Edith Wharton’s spoiled anti-heroines: sexy, insane, theatrical, improvident and entrancingly beautiful. She appears – a wanton in Worth gowns – in countless memoirs of Old New York. Men held her in near-cultic ...”

“... band in 1932, nonetheless appeared in minstrel blackface in the same year’s musical short, Dream House. It went with the territory. Henderson’s saxophone and brass subsequently double the tempo in the recording, as though they’re trying to dash away from the compromising lyrics. They can’t, notwithstanding a lovely, full-bodied concluding ...”

“... a cameo on The Simpsons.Despite his astonishing range (poems, prefaces, novels, collections of short stories, essays and reviews, the play Buchanan Dying, a gathering of golfing meditations, art criticism for museum-goers – museums for him doubling as erotic temples), Updike foresaw that he might become a victim of typecasting, tagged as an exhibit. In a ...”

“... As I was starting to write this I came across a poem by Philip Larkin, the last part of which reads: And once you have walked the length of your mind, what You command is as clear as a lading-list. Anything else must not, for you, be thought To exist. And what’s the profit? Only that, in time We half-identify the blind impress All our behavings bear, may trace it home ...”

“... began to think about Judith Hearne when he was 27, in exile from Belfast, and trying to write short stories in a remote part of Ontario: ‘I thought of this old lady who used to come to our house. She was a spinster who had some Civil Service job to do with sanitation and she lived most of her life with her “dear aunt”. They’d not been ...”

“... they tell of how much sleep has been missed, but because they bring the next day nearer. As Philip Larkin, poet of limits, knew so well, sleep has the one big disadvantage that we wake up from it: ‘In time the curtain edges will grow light,’ he wrote in ‘Aubade’, bringing ‘Unresting death, a whole day nearer now’. For Tristan and ...”

“... opportunities for amplification and further collections in the years to come.’ In 1999, when Philip Horne edited Henry James: A Life in Letters, which remains the best single selection of James’s letters – the greatest hits, all 296 of them, superbly annotated and put in context – he pointed out that half of the letters he had included had not been ...”

“... of society. Kynaston, discussing ‘City cultural supremacy’, says that ‘in all sorts of ways (short-term performance, shareholder value, league tables) and in all sorts of areas (education, the NHS and the BBC, to name but three), bottom-line City imperatives had been transplanted wholesale into British society.’ This uncritical and uninformed ...”

“... fretting to escape the inconvenience of some vulgar stiff and get at those rough flint churches. Philip Larkin (sans bicycle clips) with a Byronic makeover. Larkin reimagined by Barbara Cartland, all scowls and flashing coattails, piercing glances. This wholesome, outdoorsy Englishness, bracing weather and privatised mayhem between consenting adults, has a ...”

“... in this biographical round-up as the spouse of the subject of another biography, Rebel: The Short Life of Esmond Romilly, by Kevin Ingram. But then what else can we expect if they will marry a Duke of Devonshire (Deborah), Sir Oswald Mosley (Diana), the Communist nephew of Winston Churchill (Jessica), the inspiration of Waugh’s Basil Seal ...”

“... Couzens’s conviction for the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard, a police commissioner, Philip Allott, resigned after giving a radio interview suggesting that Everard should not have ‘submitted’ to arrest by her killer, who was, at the time, a serving police officer.Newton also cross-examined Harvey about her ‘sweetheart’ in Wellington; she ...”

“... region found hard evidence of mendacity and theft. Two men have been arrested in the US. Philip Bloom is charged with conspiracy, fraud, money laundering and other offences. He is said to have rigged bids and bribed CPA officials who awarded his companies contracts worth $3.5 million. Bloom appears to be a small-time wheeler-dealer. More interesting ...”

“... let his ‘bummers’ loose among the civilian population, telling them to do what they would, short of mass rape and murder. When he set out on his march to the sea from Atlanta, he promised to ‘make Georgia howl!’ and ‘make its inhabitants feel that war and individual ruin are synonymous terms’. By ‘ruin’, he meant everything from ...”

“... for American writers who prefer the national mannerism of the barbaric yawp. Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth and Rush are exact contemporaries, born in 1933. McCarthy excels at antique dialogue and rapturous word-pictures of frontier landscapes; likes to portray violence; won’t represent thought; can’t do women; and has denounced Henry James and the ...”

“... business, who had been living and prospering in London since the early 1580s – someone, in short, very like Christopher Mountjoy. They must certainly have known one another. How much they liked one another can perhaps be gauged from events at the magistrates’ court, where Bowin’s ‘information’ about the three Frenchmen led to embarrassing ...”