“... Observer that I had discovered in the course of some research into ‘front’ organisations that Alan Hare, chairman of the Financial Times, no less, had a background in the Secret Service. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Everybody knows that. He had to try quite hard to find work after he retired from there.’ The point seems to be that the Secret Service is not ...”

“... Peace talks. James Baker and Bush are determined to teach Saddam Hussein ‘a terrible lesson’. Alan Jenkins of TLS rang up at 7.15 p.m. to suggest I write article on two exhibitions in London next month: Man Ray photos at Barbican, Max Ernst at Tate. Thursday 10: Ron Stocker to lunch. Listened to ‘Schönberg in Hollywood’ on Radio 3. Wrote to thank ...”

“... but when he came home, it was to a 270-acre ranch, which Redding called ‘the Big O Ranch’, in Jones County, twenty miles outside Macon. Although he had bristled at anything ‘country’, the life of a country squire was the one that he’d settled on. In 1966, he began to cross over in earnest with white audiences. That spring, Redding played a series of ...”

“... Boyer, we were not called on to stand up against the Nazi oppressor or battle like Jennifer Jones against the small-mindedness of nuns or like Cornel Wilde cough blood over the piano keys in order to liberate our country from the foreign yoke. Films taught you to be happy that you were ordinary.Ordinary but not respectable, because in films respectable ...”

“... Pasmore – there were more eccentric talents of various sizes, like Stanley Spencer and David Jones, who were very English (or very Welsh) and not international at all. In drawings of wrapped sculpture in landscape and moonstruck megaliths Moore and Paul Nash gave even Surrealism an English edge. You could find evidence of deep-rooted native ...”

“... of a myth, but it helped to vilify them) – to the minor fiddles of a figure like Lance Corporal Jones, the elderly butcher in Dad’s Army who slips the buxom Mrs Fox a couple of sausages on the side. (In his LRB Diary for 2002, Alan Bennett cited a letter from a Grantham evacuee reporting the rumour that Alderman Roberts ...”

“... that Alistair McAlpine was writing his memoirs some optimists hoped he might match the diaries of Alan Clark, whose sustained and entertaining indiscretions caused such exquisite pleasure. No such luck. At least three-quarters of McAlpine’s book is a dreary account of a dreary life, whose most interesting passage is a tip about how to light a ...”

“... point it breaks down. In his most recent novels, The Stranger’s Child and The Sparsholt Affair, Alan Hollinghurst introduced long gaps into the narrative in a way that requires the reader’s relationship with the story to be renegotiated almost from scratch (the new time period tends to bring with it new points of view, further testing the ...”

“... the book was published in Nottingham at the end of 1977. Peter had been approached by Linda Lloyd-Jones to organise a conference at the ICA and he turned to the Gang of Four for ideas. My principal contribution was to argue that, like Towards Another Picture, it should be constructed to show the conflict and diversity of ideas about art and thus undermine the ...”

“... sinister memories; and Penda’s Fen (1974), a collaboration between David Rudkin and the director Alan Clarke in which a repressed Midlands schoolboy’s visions of Edward Elgar and King Penda threaten to unlock the secrets of his own sexuality. All of these productions are considered at length in The Magic Box, Rob Young’s hefty survey of occult British ...”

“... of titillation and myth. She records them, and her feelings, in an open, detached manner. Brian Jones, incapacitated by drugs, pursued other ways to penetrate her body: ‘I found it fascinating and frightening.’ Of Morrison she says: ‘We hit each other because we were drunk and we enjoyed the sensation.’ Both Morrison and ...”

“... an editor and publisher. In 1961, she founded the mimeographed magazine Floating Bear with LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). The pair were arrested for circulating obscene material in the ninth issue, but were eventually acquitted – Baraka helped persuade the grand jury by reading from the decision in the trial of Joyce’s Ulysses – and the magazine continued ...”

“... as a kind of wartime reincarnation of Christopher Smart. Gurney trained as a musician, David Jones and Isaac Rosenberg as artists; they all served in the ranks and were excluded from the mainstream of literary life after the war – Rosenberg was dead, Gurney mad, Jones given to arcane pursuits. Once again, it was the ...”

“... autobiographical collection of 150 numbered images with accompanying texts, taken down by Wendy Jones as she and Parr ‘talked through his past’. The report itself, carefully taped back together, is number 11. ‘I’ve become very proud of “utterly lazy and inattentive”,’ he explains, somewhat redundantly, adding that his headmaster had ...”

“... red with juice, which brings back a film of the 1940s which terrified me as a child. Jennifer Jones has been involved, perhaps unwillingly, in a murder, a situation anyway in which her hands are covered with blood. This sends her off the rails (‘traumatises’ her as would be said nowadays) and the memory is buried. She then comes into the care of, and ...”