“... foreigner in crumpled battledress. He came to know Spender, Orwell, MacNeice, Philip Toynbee and John Lehmann, and was invited to their parties. The Tribune left-wingers adored him; Michael Foot (as he put it himself) ‘fell an immediate swooning victim to his wit, charm and inordinate capacity for alcohol’, and to his murderous style of ...”

“... authorship must surely have been collective, the planning long-term and meticulous. The killing of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, or the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York in 2001, are the two major vortices into which conspiracy theorists have been sucked in our own time, generating ever more elaborate explanations and ...”

“... they still have allies. Shortly after McCluskey had finished speaking, Corbyn’s right-hand man, John McDonnell, slipped into the room. He had been delayed, he said, by his involvement in appointing the new shadow cabinet. ‘I wouldn’t be there,’ he said with feeling, looking around the room, ‘if it wasn’t for you.’ Then he switched to the ...”

“... on (it hardly tackles) the now permitted potash mine in the North York Moors National Park, with John Craven posing against the idyllic landscape and asking some toothless questions. The usual justifications are put forward – local employment (no one says how much or how guaranteed), local prosperity – though with no questions as to who the shareholders ...”

“... Barbara Bray takes a feelingful turn, starting with a letter of condolence written in March 1958. John Bray, Barbara’s estranged husband, the father of her two small girls, has died, and Beckett, unusually for his letters by now, brings his full rhetorical resources to bear on the task in hand: All I could say, and much more, and much better, you will have ...”

“... The idea that Smith didn’t develop is a dull one regardless of whether it’s true or false (as John Bayley pointed out: ‘She never needed to do anything so banal as to “develop”, for the spectrum of tone continuously present is amazingly wide’). Despite his earlier criticism of her interest in cats Larkin’s later review singled out ‘The Singing ...”

“... of R.S. Surtees’s genial cast: Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour (1853), lightly illustrated by John Leech, was one of my father’s favourite books, the very mention of it bringing out a rumbling chuckle of pleasure. Brogues also crossed the gender divide and they helped emphasise the newly admired boyish silhouette of the iconic 1920s gel, a tennis player ...”

“... and envol drapings – and in the excess of fabric: 18 metres for just one outfit. The designer John Cavanagh sat through the show ‘transfixed … in tears. The relief was overwhelming; the relief of seeing total beauty again.’ The government sent Madge Garland to Paris with £1000 to procure samples for British designers to copy. Garland had been ...”

“... view. And yet, for the next fifty years there were few reports on these seemingly uncharted lands. John Gunther’s bestselling 1949 memoir, Death Be Not Proud, about the death from cancer of his brilliant 17-year-old son, is a notable exception. Then, by the end of the 20th century, book-length accounts of illness were suddenly everywhere: more than thirty ...”

“... and where by the early 1920s both the poet laureate Robert Bridges and the future poet laureate John Masefield had established themselves in suburban comfort. Graves lived from 1919 to 1921 in Dingle Cottage at the bottom of Masefield’s garden. I walk my dog past the cottage quite often. It’s set down in a marshy hollow which has a faint air of primal ...”

“... to stop jostling for advantage and to start brooding on revenge. ‘Victories and defeats,’ as John Stoessinger put it, summarising Kissinger’s thinking, ‘merely lead to other wars. Only a settlement without victory or defeat could lead to stability.’ Talk of national honour was a useful holding device, because honour could never be satisfied: it ...”

“... with becoming a plumber or hairdresser or sushi chef. It would support a view of authorship like John Gregory Dunne’s, who described writing for a living as ‘a job, like laying pipe’.Imitating Authors describes two developments over the past three centuries that helped imitation lose its old sense and take a pejorative turn. The first is the ...”

“... the one long propounded in Reynolds’s Discourses, whose ‘political theory of painting’, as John Barrell phrases it, was closely bound up with his support of Burke’s attack on revolution. Blake, who said of the Discourses, ‘This Whole Book was Written to Serve Political Purposes,’ also spoke of what might be concealed in the decent drapery of ...”

“... the counter-transference (the analyst’s emotional reaction to his patient). She was cool towards John Bowlby’s pioneering combination of psychoanalytic methods with those of ethology. Her attitude to the wider intellectual community remained as unconcerned as ever. It is perhaps in fidelity to Klein that Professor Grosskurth has made little attempt to ...”

“... by a dozen other books from which I still derive an income – the gilt-edged securities, as John Osborne calls them. Once you know how to write, it is not difficult to make money. A certain facility develops. One has a notebook full of ideas, but they are not to be used as a timetable. They emerge in their own good time, usually after a long soak in the ...”