“... alcoholic) until his death in December 1985. She hardly left the house after this – according to Anthony Thwaite, who edited this collection – and died in February 2001. These letters are very different from those collected in the Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-85. Those were spirited, eloquent, witty (anyone who met Larkin would have been struck ...”

“... babies was to go away and put up in a hotel where he could write in peace. Many novelists, like Anthony Powell, found that they could not get down to work while hostilities were in progress. Not so Waugh, for whom hostilities were natural. In the beginning of the war he made time to write Put out more flags, one of his funniest books. By the end he had ...”

“... to Hollywood. Back in England she fell ‘instantly’ in love with the 33-year-old film producer Anthony Havelock-Allan, marrying him three years later. They had two sons; the older one had Down’s syndrome and the other is a judge. She never criticised Havelock-Allan, but David, evidently rightly, thinks he was ‘a selfish husband and a ...”

“... as he proudly told a friend. ‘I was at the club the other night, where were Tennyson, Browning, Anthony Trollope, Lord Houghton, Lord Stanley, Tom Taylor, Fitzjames Stephen ... with all of whom I had a pleasant gossip.’ With all of them? But even on such a loquacious evening he still spared a thought for ‘how much better worthy of such company dear ...”

“... star in films by Lubitsch and Cukor to the troubling singularity of the violent heroes of Anthony Mann’s Westerns and Hitchcock’s thrillers – an impressive plurality of the films of the 1950s that have lasted because they have psychological depth. Two other front-rank directors who favoured him were Frank Capra and John Ford: Capra served ...”

“... There, ‘sitting across from me and addressing me angrily in a loud voice, Father Michael Butler, chaplain of the university – and a lovely man – slowly read the words of the Bull in Latin … This is the kind of experience that stays with you, especially when you’re not even a proper Catholic.’ After such an experience you must turn to more ...”

“... an admirer of German Romanticism and 17th-century painting, a reimaginer of such figures as Anthony Blunt and Paul de Man, and a frequent raider of mathematics and cosmology, Banville is – no question – one of the fancy boys, sometimes verging on being a clever-clever darling. (‘As one of your most darkly glowing luminants has observed’ is the ...”

“... a smartly intrusive authorial voice who seems to tell the reader what to think (‘Mrs Anthony knew instinctively that Mrs Pettigrew was a kindly woman. Her instinct was wrong’); tight, punctual, highly novelistic plots, in which small groups of people are revealed to be sinisterly and neatly connected to each other, as they rarely are in ...”

“... history of English secondary education begins with the 1944 Education Act, usually known as the Butler Act. It was, for better and worse, the most important piece of education legislation of the 20th century, but was expected to reform an educational system already deeply divisive and inequitable. In some ways it promoted the hopes of wartime democracy; in ...”

“... which breed because a jordan isn’t provided and they have to leak in the chimney. In his memoirs Anthony Powell – Henry Yorke’s friend both at school and Oxford – comments on his ‘deep interest in the eternal contrast between everyday life’s flatness and its intensity’. Like all his best work, Loving shows his extraordinary gift for combining the ...”

“... in situ they or their staff often acted as guides. At Hatchlands in Surrey the Goodhart-Rendel butler, an imposing Wodehousian figure, became an attraction in his own right, while at West Wycombe the châtelaine Helen Dashwood, known, not especially affectionately, as ‘hell-bags’, made her disdain for hoi polloi plain as she shooed them from room to ...”

“... lie in Michener’s somewhat antique world-historical view. His Favourite ‘thinker’ is Samuel Butler (all of his literary and intellectual pantheon are 19th-century, incidentally; Michener himself was born in 1907). Like some Victorian sage, Michener’s own thinking is fundamentally biological in its premises; more particularly, it is ...”

“... only made all things without them jar But in their breasts raised up a civil war. According to Anthony à Wood’s Athenae Oxonienses, and Sidney Lee who follows Wood in the DNB, Order and Disorder is the work of Sir Allen Apsley (1616-83). The poem described by Lee as ‘rarely accessible’, now easily accessible in David Norbrook’s modern spelling ...”

“... zigged when I should have zagged’ the original remark came from the American sports reporter Red Butler, who reported it as having been said by Randolph Turpin after his defeat by Sugar Ray Robinson. How my old lady came to know this is a mystery, and how Tom comes to know it, too, as I’m sure boxing isn’t his thing. 22 January. I’m reading George ...”

“... than the Bog of Allen will ever care or know, that there was once a painter in Ireland called Jack Butler Yeats. Like McGreevy, Beckett was fascinated by Jack Yeats; in these letters Yeats the painter is almost alone among living Irish figures of the previous generation whom Beckett mentions with constant respect. In 1930, McGreevy wrote of Beckett to Jack ...”