“... books, collectors and readers. Every good secondhand bookshop offered guidance for neophytes: A. Edward Newton’s chatty books about his bookish adventures; Holbrook Jackson’s erudite Anatomy of Bibliomania, a comprehensive treatment of obsessive book-buying in the manner of Robert Burton; and sometimes even a copy of Carter and Pollard’s Inquiry into ...”

“... with which her thoughtless parents encumbered her at birth. King has her married to a ‘young man called James Monaco’ and this mistake is symptomatic of a certain vagueness in his approach to the subject, in that he never manages to elucidate all the myths which the lady’s posturings so insistently encouraged. Yet such an attack is ...”

“... by authorial complaints against Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes and the Estate (e.g. David Holbrook, Edward Butscher) or have come to nothing (e.g. Lois Ames, Harriet Rosenstein). Most of the book-length literary criticism is unimpressive. There isn’t much to choose, for example, between Margaret Dickie Uroff (‘As they developed, Plath came to locate herself ...”

“... we knew her much better than we really did. John Lehmann, writing of his early meetings with the young Stephen Spender, described Spender as ‘the most rapidly self-revealing person I had ever met’. Something of the sort might be said about Stevie: but one was simultaneously aware of a great deal that was not revealed, and never would be. The public ...”

“... he becomes engrossed in electrical experiments and succeeds in turning his brother (‘Uncle Edward’) into the chime of the front-door bell. Other characters constantly appear and disappear, though in less radical fashion, throughout both books. They include the narrator’s ineffectual and inconsequential mother, the assistants in the store who are ...”

“... As well as a group of poets, the magazine also had some energetic and intelligent new critics: young hoods not afraid to wield an axe. It seemed to matter terribly that people didn’t get things wrong, that poetry – as we confidently understood it – didn’t get turned into something else: something flashier, more prosy, more glamorous, more ...”

“... devolution provoked demands for a legislature. Agitation within the Liberal Party, headed by the Young Scots Society, brought the prospect of a parliament in view in 1913, as part of a home-rule-all-round settlement. This vanished with the Liberals, to reappear with the Independent Labour Party. Even Ramsay MacDonald, in his National Government ...”

“... Which is getting closer, by the way. Shaking the memory of some of our experiences together as young writers at the University of East Anglia and in London might get you in the mood for what’s to come, not the stuff about the late-night tattoo sessions and the three-week hunt for Mr Hashish, the Afghan border guard who stole your US Army fatigue jacket ...”

“... Miss Gallagher, a prissy governess whom neither can stand, but who suffers unrequited passion for young Cathy. The children puzzle over the sudden and mystifying disappearance of their parents, a topic which must not be spoken of in public. There are clues picked up from village gossip, from the servants, from the mean-spirited and jealous Miss ...”

“... a mortal wound. Discussion of the end of the Cold War brought Halliday into collision with Edward Thompson, and their three-part dispute is reprinted here. Thompson reproached Halliday for describing the final arms-reduction process without mention of the Peace Movement as an influence on both superpowers, and went on to accuse him of a more general ...”

“... Maude alongside consensual modernisers sceptical of market-based solutions like Iain Macleod and Edward Heath. The diversity has continued: later members have included ostensible one-nation Tories – Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Ian Gilmour – but also Keith Joseph and Nicholas Ridley. The politics of the Tory left were actually advanced in various ...”

“... that there was anything very equitable about his dealings with them. As the Jacobean diplomat Sir Edward Hoby observed, it was ‘lawful for a Christian to take away anything from infidels’. Pynchon was a restless man and six years after his arrival in America he headed a group of settlers who moved from Massachusetts Bay to a new site. Formerly the home ...”

“... launched in 1997): James Cook’s journal of the Endeavour, written in his own hand; and the Edward Koiki Mabo Papers, the record of Eddie Mabo’s landmark case before the High Court, which gave legal recognition to the fact that indigenous land ownership existed before European settlement and was not, in some cases, extinguished by the Crown. The ...”

“... thinker of 17th-century Ireland, Robert Boyle, to such 18th-century divines as William King, Edward Synge, Philip Skelton, Laurence Sterne and Jonathan Swift. Sterne, Joyce and Beckett classify the world compulsively, but only to make a mockery of the whole futile business. Walter Shandy, the obsessive rationalist of Sterne’s great novel, is clearly ...”

“... previous novel, Old Filth: both are about the same people, and some of the same stories recur. Edward Feathers, Old Filth, is very clean, and for much of the two novels isn’t old; it’s a Bar joke, an acronym, ‘failed in London try Hong Kong’. He begins his career as a QC specialising in construction law, then becomes a judge, spending most of his ...”