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“... fretfully whether we really need to know this much about Betjeman. Hillier acknowledges what, if Martin Gilbert had been a shade less thorough, might be a record number of helpers and informants. Flagging only in the last stretch of the alphabet, they range from Sir Harold Acton to Douglas Woodruff, and like his subject the author has evidently ‘made it ...”

“... He has come into all the material collected by John Lehmann’s commissioned biographer, Martin Taylor, who died before he could write a word of it. He has seen photocopies of the extensive diaries, and he has interviewed the survivors and their descendants. Lehmann himself wrote three volumes of dignified autobiography about his work, his ...”

“... Arab Peoples. When that book was published in 1991 it was strongly criticised by Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer for presenting Arab history as largely a matter of continuities, negotiated accommodations and glowing cultural achievements, underplaying the wars, factional fighting, despotism, religious bigotry and poverty. In a review in the TLS, I took much ...”

“... and functions on their own. His world is in a sense that of Hardy, Milne’s like that of C.S. Lewis or Tolkien. Milne’s ideology was not theirs, but all three have the ideologue’s intrusiveness: like Owl and Rabbit they are fundamentally bossy. Part of Milne’s cleverness, of course, is to make himself, and ourselves, and Christopher Robin and Pooh ...”

“... O’Neill, Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, Singer, Bellow, Morrison. There are others – Sinclair Lewis, Pearl S. Buck and John Steinbeck – for whom non-literary factors seem to have been at work. With Steinbeck one can guess what the factors were. Europeans have always had what Graham Greene called a ‘fetish’ about him. It was a lucky stroke that The ...”

“... All Change, was published in 2013, and she died in January this year, aged ninety. Her stepson Martin Amis advised her to embark on the Cazalet books, when she was hesitating between possibilities. It was good advice – and not only because they brought her solid sales and secured her popularity. The material of the chronicles seems like Howard’s ...”

“... no breakfast, nothing but ‘monishing and stripes’. Or as an Irish classmate said sadly to C.S. Lewis at Campbell College more than four centuries later: ‘This time last month, I wouldn’t have been going in to Preparation, I’d have a wee tea-cloth laid for me at one end of the table and sausages to my ...”

“... by officials with close ties to Israel or to prominent pro-Israel organisations; among them, Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of research at AIPAC and co-founder of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Dennis Ross, who joined WINEP after leaving government in 2001; and Aaron Miller, who has lived in Israel and often ...”

“... London sparrow (gone, vanished) which puts in a rather showy appearance in the opening sequence of Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog. Amis is working so hard, as is the sparrow, to be live, engaging, on-the-money; the throwaway charm is so affected, so sub-Keatsian, that the inevitable violence that follows makes for a very pretty natural break. ‘A sparrow, a ...”

“... the book is a Geoffrey Hill parody which pictures Hill playing tennis against his devoted admirer Martin Dodsworth: Who crouches at the net, his mouth compressed Severely to a little Gothic slit? On the whole, though, the book falls well short of its pre-match billing. Most of the poems are too long, and too many of the jokes fall flat. Humour supposed to ...”

“... Great Tradition. (‘The great children’s novelists,’ Inglis begins unequivocally, ‘are Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Arthur Ransome, William Mayne and Philippa Pearce.’) What they may be charged with is not treating this fact with the seriousness it deserves: not, indeed, considering even the possibility that it might ...”

“... Perchance to Dream (1991), a sequel to The Big Sleep, was hampered by its title, which caused Martin Amis to wonder in the New York Times if Sleep Bigger or The Bigger Sleep would have done the job more effectively. The Black-Eyed Blonde might seem to go too far the other way, but it’s an echt Chandlerism: Banville took it from a list of titles Chandler ...”

“... not the other. Kathleen Raine and Ruth Pitter cannot be found in O’Brien, but Elma Mitchell and Martin Bell cannot be found in Armitage and Crawford. Elma Mitchell’s ‘Thoughts after Ruskin’ is a revelation, and to put her in is to do exactly the sort of thing anthologies are meant to do: extend the terrain as they go over it. These books are also ...”

“... than ‘outrageous’ (the blurb’s word), will fill us with a gloom like that discerned by Martin Scorsese in the worn features of the aging funnyman played by Jerry Lewis in his splendid recent film King of Comedy. The stories in Italo Calvino’s Marcovaldo (1963), a collection of 20 urban fables occupying a point ...”

“... the freelance testimony of Susan Rosenstiel, wife of the mobbed-up ‘businessman’ and swinger Lewis Rosenstiel, one of Hoover’s many and sweaty connections to the high life of organised crime. At a session with Roy Cohn in the Plaza Hotel in 1958, the Director of the FBI was allegedly wearing a fluffy black dress, very fluffy, with flounces, and lace ...”