“... from our heads/But when we first agreed to put them on’). As well as translating War Primer, John Willett, co-editor of the new Collected Works, has revised his volume of essays, Brecht in Context. Although hostile to John Fuegi’s argument, set out in The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht (1994), that Brecht’s ...”

“... John Fothergill, the high-handed host of the Spreadeagle at Thame between the world wars, described himself in Who’s Who as ‘Pioneer Amateur Innkeeper’. Evelyn Waugh, sending him a copy of Decline and Fall, inscribed it to ‘Oxford’s only civilising influence’. To those who, in 1931, goggled and giggled at his innkeeping confessions, Fothergill was the contumacious dandy for ever locked in combat with ‘clients’ who fell short of his standards, a man prepared to track down and rebuke a brigadier-general who, with his wife, dropped in to the Spreadeagle to use the lavatory without a please or thank you ...”

“... you write as you talk?’ Meredith was probably no more solipsistic than anyone else but, as John Bayley once nicely remarked in a review of the collected poems, his hallmark idiom is about as solipsistic as can be. The poetry celebrates open-air, big-hearted, honest and robust virtues, but its usual manner is contrived, self-absorbed, often deeply ...”

“... intent on shaping every detail himself. This upset ambitious directors. When Alfred Hitchcock made Rebecca, Spell-bound and The Paradine Case, he was told to stop ‘cutting in the camera’, and to shoot enough film for Selznick to control the editing. Not surprisingly, these were three of Hitchcock’s feebler films. Much of Selznick’s work was inspired by ...”

“... of Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs, including, a few weeks ago, our current island governor John Major. The BBC’s (by now rather crowded) island retreat both affirms and denies the insular character of Britain itself: once there, you would have the advantages of an island without the British climate and the rest of the British people. The Prime ...”

“... what the devil to make of this music, and most of us were frank enough to say so’, as the critic John Runciman put it – an attitude that no doubt contributed to the perception that Delius’s music was formless.Delius spent so much of his life abroad that the British context offers only a partial perspective. As a child he taught himself piano, having had ...”

“... practices of another. In the mosque’s main hall of worship stand the tombs of Abraham, Jacob and Rebecca, sacred to Jews and Muslims. Before 1967 a small rabbinical school, located at the back of the mosque, had been unused for generations: after 1967 the Israelis reopened it, built a library there, and re-excavated some more Old Testament tombs (those of ...”

“... cultural ascendancy was beginning. These artists – George Luks, Everett Shinn, William Glackens, John Sloan and George Bellows – had all (Bellows apart) started out in the 1890s as newspaper sketch-artists in Philadelphia. Drawn together by the magnetic preaching of Robert Henri, a slightly older painter who had returned from art school in Paris to his ...”

“... make it cosy. In the run-up to the Munich Agreement, the drama critic Alexander Woollcott wrote to Rebecca West that he had the ‘impression from a fairly faithful reading of Dorothy Thompson in the Herald Tribune that she may sail at any minute in order to strangle Neville Chamberlain’.After Hitler’s invasion of Poland, opinion pollsters asked Americans ...”

“... this deadpan claim to literary originality: Swift lifted these words from the Restoration poet Sir John Denham’s praise of Abraham Cowley: ‘To him no author was unknown,/Yet what he wrote was all his own.’ As it happens, it was Cowley’s rhapsodic style Swift began his career by imitating, so that (he bragged to a cousin in 1692) ‘when I writt what ...”

“... made of it than either the waters or their meeting deserve.’ This is the English travel writer John Barrow writing of the Vale of Avoca in 1835. Like him, I find it hard to decide on the register of the phrase, so lyrical as a song title, so grandiloquent as a synonym for ‘confluence’; unlike Barrow, I find these meetings fascinating, but I don’t ...”

“... rationalist, anti-clerical and republican, showing more affinity with the Co. Derry freethinker John Toland (1670-1722) than with such rosary-bead nationalists as Pádraic Pearse. After Toland, the figure that mattered most to him, historically at least, was Wolfe Tone. The rising of the United Irishmen in 1798 has long been important for republicans ...”

“... Literally. I had been thinking about it hard and wrote my first article, off my own bat, about Rebecca. It was fuelled by an old-fashioned indignation. I was furious at the Marxist critics I was reading who called romance readers ‘dupes’ and saw their longings as false consciousness. Romance, I argued, not quite pontificating, was always a sign of ...”

“... his children. During a period in England, he introduced them to the likes of Carlyle, Tennyson and John Stuart Mill. He expressed himself in a characteristically Jamesian way: ‘I will not attempt to state the year in which I was born, because it is not a fact embraced in my own knowledge, but content myself with saying instead, that the earliest event of my ...”

“... its mass media, sometimes at the expense of its idea of nationality. On the eve of World War Two, John Reith believed passionately in radio broadcasting as an extension of national culture, but was outmanoeuvred by the audience’s delight in ‘knob-twiddling’. By 1935, there were 7.4 million radio licences in the United Kingdom, but not all radios were ...”