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“... An onlooker’, Clive James writes in North Face of Soho (2006), the fourth instalment of his memoirs, ‘might say that I have Done Something. But I’m still not entirely sure about the “something”, and not at all sure about the “I” … Who is this character?’ James’s CV takes a while to unpack even if you aren’t its owner, and it doesn’t help that people’s perceptions of him vary according to nationality and, above all, age ...”

“... independent world of language – ‘random likenesses thrown out by our lexical cosmos’, in James Wood’s definition, part of ‘the delicious surplus of life’. Lamb’s own definition is thata pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect. It is an antic which does not ...”

“... my most puzzled admiration.’The line about trusting tales appears as an epigraph to Frances Wilson’s vivid and unusual new book. The quotation runs on to Lawrence’s next sentence, which constitutes a peculiar sort of commission: ‘The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.’ Its application to his own ...”

“... boy poet, Rimbaud, although few homosexual liaisons in history are more celebrated – as Edmund Wilson pointed out in a severely critical piece in the New Yorker in 1944. But, apart from the disadvantage of sexual deviation, Harold Nicolson lacked the decisiveness, the hardness and the ruthlessness of the successful public man. He had too many doubts, too ...”

“... first to women named Linda then to women named Betty, and had sons with nearly identical names (James Alen and James Allen). The reunited twins in the study often became friends; in one instance, they became lovers. These eerie inventories of common traits and interests weren’t, according to Mistra researchers, simply ...”

“... account of the siege of Derry. In the winter of 1688 the Catholic forces of the recently deposed James II surrounded the largely Protestant city. Its governor, Robert Lundy, wanted to negotiate surrender as they didn’t have the resources to withstand a prolonged siege. But thirteen apprentice boys defied him and closed the gates. Lundy was ...”

“... at gunpoint, which was certainly not true. Bonnie and Clyde saw themselves as outlaws, like Jesse James, as Bonnie wrote in ‘The End of the Line’: You’ve read the story of Jesse James – Of how he lived and died; If you’re still in need Of something to read Here’s the story of Bonnie and Clyde. Clyde was no ...”

“... may emerge a poet, like Taliesin, or a healer, like Vikram.‘Anancy and the Hideaway Garden’ (James Berry’s excellent rendering), gives us the opposite scenario. Old Witch-Sister has a beautiful garden which Anancy Spider-man wants to enjoy. ‘Look at fattest vegetables! Look at shining fruits and flowers!’ So he tricks the witch and her gardener to ...”

“... but the virtual disappearance of senior figures in local government has passed unremarked. In the Wilson and Callaghan Cabinets there were only two or three ministers who had served as local councillors and none who had led a Borough or County Council. Local government leaders received their knighthoods and occasionally went to the House of Lords. Secondary ...”

“... be one of the greatest writers who have ever lived,’ Scott Fitzgerald said to his friend Edmund Wilson when they were just out of college, ‘don’t you?’ Wilson was the son of a lawyer, a bit chilly, a prodigious reader steeped in Plato and Dante. He thought Fitzgerald’s remark foolish – just what you might expect ...”

“... written to accompany the Channel 4 series of the same name – with the euphoria of Harold Wilson’s victory in 1964. He ends in 1981 with the ‘drying-out of the wets’ by Mrs Thatcher in her autumn reshuffle. The underlying theme, if only a whisper in the reader’s ear, is plain enough: the erosion of the post-war state, the collapse of consensus ...”

“... One of the odder political books I have read is The Abuse of Power, by James Margach, the veteran lobby correspondent of the Sunday Times. Published in 1978, the book was subtitled with a flourish: ‘The war between Downing Street and the media from Lloyd George to Callaghan’. For 40 years and more, Margach had enjoyed the confidence of prime ministers ...”

“... with the huge cloudy cosmogonies and highly personal symbolisms of the Prophetic Books’. James Joyce, apparently, was ‘son-ridden’. Ghost-ridden writers have included Amanda Ross (a C.S. Lewis favourite). There is a sort of bluff, bar-parlour (almost) manner in which Sayers sews up the Trinitarian response to life that might, if one were very ...”

“... engagée’s entrance into politics was. At a New York publisher’s party in November 1936, James Farrell, author of Studs Lonigan, asked the 24-year-old Mary McCarthy if she thought Trotsky – recently accused, at the Moscow trials, of conspiring with the Nazis to assassinate Stalin and foment a counter-revolution – was entitled to a hearing in his ...”

“... fishing, shooting, whoring, drinking, fathering kids, being a friend to F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce etc. The only way they noticed I injured myself was because I could not spell hemmorage and still cannot. But it is very easy to injure yourself up here. Everybody is drunk all the time – it is the thing to be, like snotty in England – and your ...”