“... 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 ...”

“... of 1181 votes on a turnout of 47,717. His death reduced the parliamentary majority of Harold Wilson’s government to one seat. Labour’s candidate was Kevin McNamara, a lecturer at Hull College of Commerce and a local party activist. The Conservative candidate was the enthusiastic but inexperienced Toby Jessel.Gott, who had never been to Hull ...”

“... the ‘Jazz Age’ while paying the Fitzgeralds’ bills for a decade; the friendships with Edmund Wilson, Ring Lardner, Gerald and Sara Murphy, and above all with Hemingway; the insanity that crippled Zelda during the Thirties, and the alcoholism that devastated Scott; the prolonged composition and demoralising failure of Tender is the night; Zelda’s ...”

“... batch of studies finds, in the USA, Peter Plan and T.G. Bishop combing the plays for miracles and James Biester finding the key to Renaissance courtly poetry in its strategies for eliciting astonishment. Back home, Jonathan Bate is gobsmacked by the sheer Genius of Shakespeare. It’s perhaps as well to remember that in cooler moments Jonson complained that ...”

“... had not known what to do. (As in a well-scripted movie, there was a reaction shot of Lord Wilson not reacting: giving points for liveliness, in fact, to Lord Shinwell. Whoever was on the buttons had a flying finger. When television is as well-directed as this, you’re not only there, you’re looking in the right place.) ‘What is really ...”

“... one an appetite for more of the same. It is not immediately clear how the reader should take A.N. Wilson’s latest novel, and one rather enjoyably flounders through it. The title – Incline our hearts – is a false clue. A religious element is present but not dominant. The opening quarter of the narrative comes across as a comic set-piece in a familiar ...”

“... Speculation, Leon Edel remarks in his one-volume life of Henry James, is ‘the stock-in-trade of all biographers’. But if all biographers speculate, some do so more scrupulously and convincingly than others. Edel, for instance, is both meticulous and plausible. The same can hardly be said of Martin Seymour-Smith in his new critical biography of Kipling ...”

“... attitudes about elite culture, make the top-down instruction provided with such grumpy relish by Wilson problematic. But the chief reason is that the academy won: it was not writers who changed literary criticism, but academic criticism that changed literary criticism. It made it, precisely, more academic. Theory, metalled with its own unforgiving ...”

“... of saying she wasn’t the twenty-year-old girl of ‘The Turn of the Screw’, had not lived what James called ‘a small, smothered life’, and was most unlikely not to have seen herself full-length in a mirror before she got to the haunted house at Bly. Of course she sheds much of this past when she comes to the new film – she’s an actress. But she’s ...”

“... of Proust: Gide’s observation reminds us that it is pointless to get so worked up – as Edmund Wilson did – about Proust’s dogmas on love, jealousy or sex. These are indeed not intended to prove anything. We come to accept them, surely, as bees in the bonnet of an old friend, for it is one of the last secrets of Proust’s art … that the ...”

“... reorganisation and new building since then, as Lucilla Burn’s new history of the museum (Philip Wilson, £25) concisely and effectively demonstrates. All through this year, an exhibition accompanies and fleshes out the new history, illuminating the character and achievements of successive directors, the often difficult relationship between the Fitzwilliam ...”

“... Attlee’s succession. The Parliamentary Party split at the point of Bevan’s resignation. Harold Wilson and John Freeman resigned with him, but the division was kept within bounds by the need to sustain the Government until Labour’s defeat in the October 1951 General Election. After that, the conflict rapidly increased in momentum: the Bevanites, with the ...”

“... on the chin he never had. But he was the last British party leader to take such a relaxed view. Wilson is justly celebrated as a wizard manipulator of the broadcast media, and Mr Cockerell gives chapter and verse to support that reputation. He credits Wilson, for example, with inventing the walkabout as an election ...”

“... by a homosexual honeytrap on a trip to Prague. Instead of having Stonehouse prosecuted, Harold Wilson asked him to the Number Ten sitting room for a chat. The prime minister wasn’t inclined to believe the accusations. It turned out that Frolik had never actually met Stonehouse, and there was no evidence that Stonehouse was homosexual. In his ...”

“... In her lifetime she was praised by H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Louise Bogan, but Edmund Wilson said that One of Ours,* her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was a complete failure and that My Antonia ended on the level of a Ladies Home Journal serial. Lionel Trilling called The Professor’s House ‘lame’ and Ernest Hemingway thought Cather had found ...”