“... as an actor by the age of 17.) Exactly the same view has even found a reductio ad absurdum, in Frank McGuinness’s bizarre new play, Mutabilitie, which was shown at the National Theatre recently: here, a delirious, burned-out Shakespeare, dropping in on Spenser near Cork in 1598, is overheard muttering Hail Marys by a prophetess in the local Irish ...”

“... was sung to open the games. Only Americans – Dennis Mitchell after winning a 100-metres heat and Michael Johnson after taking the 200-metre gold – puffed out their chests and pulled their jerseys to display the national emblem. Only Americans accused an Irish swimmer of using drugs when she won the Olympic gold. Only an eliminated American boxer, Fernando ...”

“... At the beginning of Mr Holroyd’s third volume Shaw, now 62, is expressing strong views, sensible but not attended to, on the conduct of the nation’s affairs in a difficult postwar period. He began this long last lap of life by campaigning for Ramsay MacDonald, and the other anti-Coalition candidates, in Lloyd George’s opportunistic general election of December 1918 ...”

“... Ballard and Burgess: ‘the failure is (vexingly, boringly, ineffably) a failure of language.’ Michael Crichton has a bad case of cliché rot (‘animals – especially, if not exclusively, velociraptors – are what he is good at. People are what he is bad at. People, and prose.’ Crichton has ‘herds of clichés, roaming free. You will listen in ...”

“... Pembroke. The Rival Poet of Sonnet 86 remains George Chapman, not, as some think, Samuel Daniel or Michael Drayton or Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson or, since his was assuredly an ‘alien pen’ (Sonnet 78), Torquato Tasso. Candidates for the doubtful honour of being the Dark Lady are discussed (so far as the list went in 1970) and a slight preference is ...”

“... style of interesting poets like Peter Didsbury, John Ash, Pauline Stainer and one of the editors, Michael Hulse, is not particularly ‘democratic’, but playfully enigmatic and donnish. There is a tendency to think aloud with a somewhat creaky jauntiness, as if the poets were sharing secrets with their desks; It has been raining all day, and I found myself ...”

“... European allies. He also defended it in the House of Commons, and the foreign secretary, Michael Stewart, even appeared on television to defend American actions. At a televised ‘teach in’ in Oxford in June 1965, Stewart argued that ‘the future relationship between North and South could, in time, be a matter for the genuine free decisions of the ...”

“... the Falklands War broke out, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office was Sir Michael Palliser. He was not disposed to blame his department for the catastrophe. Unlike the Prime Minister, for whom the war was proof of Foreign Office incompetence if not perfidy, Sir Michael pleaded after the event that he ...”

“... was arrested the next day in Birmingham. The five were taken to Morecambe police station where Dr Frank Skuse, a Home Office forensic scientist, tested their hands for evidence of contact with explosives. Meanwhile a posse of detectives from the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad headed up the motorway to interview the suspects. In Morecambe Skuse conducted a ...”

“... the All Party Alliance, although a wit said that his only allies were Anthony Morton, Gordon Ashe, Michael Halliday and other Creasey pseudonyms.) His books were popular but not highly regarded, and this worried and baffled him. Why, he asked me once, was there thought to be so much difference between Creasey and Shakespeare? Wasn’t Macbeth a crime ...”

“... to be one kind of storyteller, and turns out to be quite another; casual sexual partners Tommy and Frank, friends who meet for dreamy, almost absent-minded chemsex; employer and employee, Ronnie the plumber and his mate Pigeon, whom Ronnie accidentally leaves behind at the end of a workday and who hides for days in the attic of a client’s house.We have ...”

“... James novel, and all he thinks about is his neighbour’s legacy, or more precisely ‘what old Frank would have done with the fruits of his swindle, on the occasion of the rupture that had kept them apart in hate and vituperation for so many years’. It’s a great beginning, but what we have of the completed novel is only more of the beginning. The ...”

“... services and insurance schemes thirty years later. (A hazy episode from the 1972 campaign involves Frank Sheeran, the hitman portrayed by Robert De Niro in The Irishman, allegedly organising a truck drivers’ strike on behalf of the Bidens, preventing the delivery of a newspaper carrying ads for Joe’s opponent.) Schreckinger conveys an impression of Jim as ...”

“... but without it life would be meaningless as well. Or so the characters come to suspect. Michael Ahearn, the leading man of Stone’s new novel, Bay of Souls, starts out as one of these worldly protagonists. Quietly dissatisfied, fond of the bottle but sustained by the unexamined vestiges of Catholic faith, he teaches American literature in a sterile ...”

“... is unmasked he should turn out to be ... other critics. The first to be identified is our own Frank Kermode, whose argument in his 1973 Eliot lectures, The Classic, is in two sentences of the second lecture neatly travestied and so dismissed. He survives to fight another day, as we shall see. The next antagonist, in a third lecture called ‘Shakespeare ...”