“... seemingly innocent. In another writer it might be malicious or mechanical or just for show. In Evelyn Waugh or Muriel Spark the same kind of observation would have about it a routine conscientiousness, a reminding of the reader what things are like, and a reassurance that the author’s outlook and style are perfectly fitted to do them justice. Pym is not ...”

“... often.’ Margery Dayrell worried that her son Nathaniel could not sleep, though he was drowsy. John Windmill complained that he ‘cannot sleepe nor take any rest on his bed or up or Downe’. Hugh Thomson feared that his son, ‘who he supposeth to be taken or planet stroken’, had been unable to sleep the previous night. Broken and disrupted sleep could ...”

“... the biographising of Anthony Eden is one of some interest. He offered the task to the late Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, author of many major books including a study of the Munich crisis and the official biography of George VI, who agreed on condition that he would not be expected to publish in Lord Avon’s lifetime. By a tragic irony of events Sir ...”

“... The dust jacket of the final volume of Bevis Hillier’s epic life of John Betjeman shows the poet laureate seized by giggles. In this lengthy coda to Hillier’s authorised biography Betjeman appears in many lights, but he’s rarely carefree. ‘Nothing frightens me more than the thought of dying,’ he told a friend in 1958 ...”

“... I pushed him, that he may indeed have taken a few too many suitcases to Addis Ababa in 1936. ‘Evelyn overdid it,’ he said. ‘Overdoing it was rather his thing.’We sat upstairs under a huge portrait of Disraeli. Thatcher was across from me, wearing a blue, sparkly twinset and a flowery brooch. She looked very tired, like someone who’s done too much ...”

“... Is it possible for a novelist to write too well? This has sometimes seemed to be the case with John Updike, whose ability to evoke physical detail is unmatched. It is a virtue in accordance with his expressedly realist aesthetic. ‘My own style seemed to be a groping and elemental attempt to approximate the complexity of envisioned phenomena, and it surprised me to have it called luxuriant and self-indulgent; self-indulgent, surely, is what it wasn’t – other-indulgent, rather ...”

“... thinly re-created. There seems none of the ‘excitement with place’, for instance, that worked Evelyn Waugh up to his refugee-in-America satire, The Loved One. Sally Emerson’s The Listeners shapes up as if it is going to be a rather conventional and thoroughly English novel of the kind Malcolm Bradbury describes as chronicling the female orgasm in ...”

“... Shortly before he died in 1922, John Butler Yeats wrote an angry, defensive letter to his eldest son William. W.B. Yeats had published a memoir in the Dial and his father objected to the almost parenthetical mention in one episode of an ‘enraged’ Yeats family. The remark unleashed in him a long-restrained irritation, prompting an impassioned defence of his daughters ...”

“... to the gateway with its heraldic bull’s head, so discouraging to the female students. Dudley St John Magnus also lives in Canada, but he was born in Surrey and claims to have lived as a bagman in Australia in the Thirties. The narrator of his semi-autobiographical novel, Hanabeke, is called Morton Montgomery de Ruthwell (a name as unsuitable for an ...”

“... or Byronic about him. Though his funny face had great charm he was the reverse of handsome: John Sparrow, in one of his feline mots, remarked that ‘the trouble with Cyril is that he is not so beautiful as he looks.’ But he was a living repository of nostalgia, and of the most stylish sort of self-pity; and these, if properly served up, can be a ...”

“... death, minority but important voices declare that they don’t care for shows. In 1661 John Evelyn noted that ‘the old plays’ like Hamlet were starting ‘to disgust this refined age’, and a decade later Dryden felt that the play smelled ‘a little too strongly of the buskin’ – the archaic theatrical boot. These are English ...”

“... death. Again, the novel’s message is written in letters a foot high, like a Brechtian slogan. As Evelyn Waugh observed fifty years ago, the only problem the Americans haven’t been able to solve is death. But, in their can-do way, they keep trying – with cryogenics, channelling, tele-evangelism, liposuction, or whatever. Both of Thomson’s earlier novels ...”

“... John le Carré has now published 23 books, the Great Bear of that night sky being the series of novels lit by the round English gentleman, spymaster George Smiley, he who wipes his glasses with the thick end of his unfailing tie. Among the features of these spy stories is a concern with patriotism and uncertainty, not least with the uncertainties of patriotism ...”

“... worm Caenorhabditis elegans and the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. In The Century of the Gene, Evelyn Fox Keller states early on that her aim is to explore the impact the human genome project (which encompasses the sequencing of genomes other than the human) has had on both biological thought and practice. It is consequently a great surprise that she fails ...”

“... her as he had been before. Only one person seems to have found Duff Cooper ‘intolerable’ – Evelyn Waugh. The reasons could be interesting. The novelist was, after all, dedicated to a showing-up of the proprieties and to what amounts, in a way, to a sadistic hatred of them. In A Handful of Dust they are all tossed upside down: Tony Last is destroyed by ...”