“... have seen it coming? The advance, I mean to say, of a mediocre but ruthless man without qualities? Philip Ziegler’s book charts the boy Wilson’s ghastly youth, replete with team spirit, sycophancy, Scout’s honour and a craving to please elders and authority. There it all is, if you can stomach the reading of it. (It used to be expressed in another ...”

“... Suffering pain, writer’s block, and the rage of critics, Philip Roth’s hero Zuckerman resolves to quit writing fiction and go to medical school. ‘Who quarrels with an obstetrician?’ he reasons: He catches what comes out and everybody loves him. When the baby appears they don’t start shouting: ‘You call that a baby!’ No, whatever he hands them, they take it home ...”

“... dreams came true. Here was a music that was frightening in its implications.’ The critic Martin Williams, who persuaded Joe Termini, the owner of the Five Spot, to book Coleman’s band, wrote: ‘I believe that what Ornette Coleman is playing will affect the whole character of jazz music profoundly and pervasively.’ John Lewis agreed; so did the ...”

“... book. So if you’re an academic wanting to write a book about Psycho, you really need an angle. Philip Skerry has come up with 60 angles: the 49 shots that make up the ‘shower scene’ proper, from Marion’s feet stepping into the bathtub to the moment when Norman is heard shouting ‘Mother! Oh God! Mother! Blood! Blood!’ back at the house, which ...”

“... and mysteriously resigned as Premier. The list, written down by Wilson’s éminence grise, Marcia Williams, on her lavender-coloured writing paper, consisted almost entirely of rich right-wing businessmen who supported the Tory Party. It included the Lord High Buccaneer from Milnsbridge, James Hanson. When Thatcher was returned as Prime Minister in ...”

“... the poem read as being about what it proclaims as its subject: Alexander the Great remembering Philip of Macedon.’ The middle stanza of ‘From an Asian Tent’ reads: You held me once before the army’s eyes; During their endless shout, I tired and slid Down past your forearms to the cold surprise Your plated shoulder made between my thighs. This ...”

“... for the scholar sufficiently rigorous in his principles. The more sceptical British bibliographer, Philip Gaskell, undermines this monist doctrine in From Writer to Reader (1978), where with self-conscious editorial quixotism he sets out to ‘establish’ the text of Stoppard’s Travesties. Using the playwright’s working script, various rehearsal and stage ...”

“... or even failed, writer is as interesting as reading the works of ‘successful’ ones, like Philip Roth, say, or Martin Amis, who are strong, sure and able. With Brautigan, one sees the fissures, the slapdash detail, the failures of nerve and, of course, the steep decline just at the point when it should all have been going the other way. Brautigan was ...”

“... There’s the hardboiled prison yarn (school of Papillon); the sentimental education (Emlyn Williams with attitude); the Brideshead years (revised by Will Self); Kensington decadence (‘We threw a disgustingly lavish party ... The food was limited to caviar and foie gras, the drink to Stolichnaya and Dom Perignon ... Peter Whitehead married Dido ...”

“... Thirties, Gielgud was able to put into practice some of the lessons he had learned from Harcourt Williams at the Old Vic, and through Harcourt Williams from Granville Barker. These were simple productions with continuity of action and unity of design, and were entirely modern in feeling. Wardle quotes Tyrone Guthrie as ...”

“... it, as though the duffing-up were more important than dealing with Orwell’s own writing. Raymond Williams is taken behind the bike sheds for a particularly nasty going-over; repetition of another kind adds to the problem here, since the substance of this long section was first delivered at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival in 1999 (as the Raymond ...”

“... poets, at least, may be drawing closet to our Irish omphaloskepsis. In a fine essay on the work of Philip Larkin. Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill. Heaney notes that they now seem to feel that the England they once knew is disappearing, and this has ‘driven all three of these writers into a kind of piety towards their local origins’. ‘All three,’ he ...”

“... To be fair, there were some men she liked. They tended to be showbusiness people. She liked Robin Williams, Charlie Chaplin, Tommy Lee Jones and Al Pacino. She also liked Salinger. (‘Jerry’ had been a friend since the 1950s and Lillian could sometimes sound like a female Holden Caulfield, railing against the phonies.) She got a fine awareness of ‘the ...”

“... between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’. Jones misses the power of what the blogger Alex Williams has defined as ‘negative solidarity’ inside a demoralised, struggling and stratified proletariat. A blunt example: in the 1990s, when my father was working shifts as a sheet-metal worker, he loved to watch Harry Enfield, particularly the characters ...”

“... the Beatnik era, establishing important transatlantic connections with Robert Creeley, Jonathan Williams, Lorine Niedecker and others. The break-up of his first marriage in 1964 terminated this period of relative stability, initiating the chapter of uncertainty that coincided with his first letters to Stephen Bann. At no stage in Finlay’s ...”