“... Book Fair. If you have the bottle, you can penetrate embattled stacks of used books, where you may be effortlessly insulted by a sodality of even more used bookdealers, none of whom will lift their eyes from their chessboards or cadged newspapers. These places have become the clearing house for exhausted libertarian and ‘counterculture’ dreck. Soft ...”

“... Pistols. But Savage knows as well as everybody else that an awful lot of it wasn’t. The Slits may have started out as very young, rather posh, utterly unmusical Sex Pistols groupie-girls, but they had long, unspikey hair and unpunklike girly little frocks; their music was no garage-thrash drone but a vertiginously spare and reggae-like space filled with ...”

“... his friend Sir Peter Bukton not to get married again without taking warning from the Wife of Bath may be one of Chaucer’s common self-simplifications, Pearsall still sees parts of Chaucer’s analysis of marriage as ‘unblinkingly hostile’, and perhaps – though this is approaching boundaries of speculation Pearsall will not cross – the result of the ...”

“... first huge volume ends at the 1946 Election, with JFK’s entire political career still ahead. One may doubt whether Hamilton will really get all that remains into what his publishers promise will be ‘a second and final volume’: he has secured the full co-operation of Mrs Onassis, is exploiting the resources of the JFK Presidential Library, and his earlier ...”

“... until becoming ill with cancer, one symptom of which is that he is prone to delusions – which may make him an even more proficient fictionaliser than is his counterpart the professional writer. Lured to Israel by the apparition of Roth II, Roth I becomes embroiled in a plot which eventually involves him committing himself to work as an undercover agent ...”

“... would have let me walk into the RPG round. I wouldn’t have felt a thing.’ The primal Baggit may know the purple fields better than anyone, but, accordingly, he is least likely of all to adjust to civilian life. His end in the beauty parlour comes as no surprise to Hollywood, who realises that for someone that mean and tough there can be no permanent ...”

“... Night, her novel of manners and Oxford, has not been well understood. Modern detective fiction may be schematically divided, pace Binyon, into stories of the professional (police) and the amateur: the categories correspond approximately to Symons’s ‘crime novel’ and ‘detective story’, which latter he has been eager to declare obsolete beyond ...”

“... and France, against Egypt, now the standard bearer of radical Arab nationalism. The period 1949-56 may be seen simply as an interval between the first and second rounds. But it was a critical phase in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, a period of increasing hostility leading to violence and then to full-scale war which set the pattern for decades to ...”

“... the combined effect of thousands of tiny perceptual connections, microscopic hooks and eyes. His may be the first prose style to be influenced by Velcro. The self-enclosure of his narrators (Baker has yet to risk a third person) is very striking. A surprising amount could be conveyed about the books in which they appear by renaming them, as if they were ...”

“... she left the company to take on other roles (thus initiating this correspondence) suggests she may have come to find it stifling. Pirandello scarcely separates her from himself; all his dreams are for their mutual triumph. ‘Now, in our case the true truth is this: that I am your true father, and that you are my creature, my creature, my creature, in ...”

“... the privilege.’ This untraceable observation of Trotsky’s was widely credited, even if it may have originated with Macdonald himself. Again, one finds the permanent clown and misfit peeping out from behind the staunch campaigner. Reconsidering Macdonald’s contributions to Partisan Review and to his own small mag Politics (clue to the italic hommage ...”

“... capitalism’, which nobody predicted and through which we are now living, or existing, may not last long. The division of the world economy into classes is a fact that is only ignored because it is so frighteningly obvious. ‘Anti-fascist’ may well cease to be a term of honour bestowed on past warriors, and ...”

“... novels, she assures us, ‘continue to inspire readers’, though it is hard to know who these may be. A further glance at the reference shelf shows that Mrs Leavis, in Fiction and the Reading Public, deigns to mention Ouida, Marie Corelli and Ethel M. Dell, but not Glyn. Two thick Companions to Literature, one of them edited by Margaret Drabble, give her ...”

“... it) the Soviet Union. Lord Moggerhanger is looking for a new chauffeur and courier. Protest as he may about keeping his hands clean, Cullen is the sort of permanent adolescent who (having failed to become a sailor, a pilot or an engine-driver) would do almost anything to get behind the wheel of another man’s Rolls-Royce. Naturally he cannot resist Lord ...”

“... have been conferred on C/7044 Pte C.E. Peel, had he lived’. The letter is dated Winchester, 10 May 1921. ‘In forwarding the Decoration I am commanded by the King to assure you of His Majesty’s high appreciation of the services rendered.’ Even as a small child rooting for biscuits, I can see that His Majesty’s high appreciation doesn’t amount to ...”