“... with supernatural belief could revive the novel from the secularised characters of Forster and Woolf, who ‘wandered like cardboard symbols through a world that was paper thin’. Bad Catholics in his early novels – the Augustinian hoodlum Pinkie in Brighton Rock or the whisky priest in The Power and the Glory – are living witnesses to heaven and ...”

“... with Adam Smyth. Making them has remained one of the print professional’s crafts, as Virginia Woolf learned to her displeasure when she wore her eyes out compiling them. (Pulling together an index from a floor littered with little squares of paper wasn’t as gripping as setting type and sewing bindings.) But the index was also something more than part of ...”

“... Having reviewed the emancipating influence of a good smoke on the writing capacities of Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, George Orwell and Compton Mackenzie, he poses the large question whether ‘with abstainers multiplying, we may soon have to ask whether literature is going to become impossible – or has already begun to be impossible.’ It’s ...”

“... man has no ready buttress for his self-regard. That historian is fictional: he is the narrator of Michael Young’s 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy. But the only thing significantly off the mark about his dystopian predictions is that his narrator is saying these things, as opposed to merely thinking them. Mount’s Uppers do, broadly speaking, think ...”

“... caused a sensation and silenced Bevan for some time, but you won’t read about it in Michael Foot or Barbara Castle’s endless evocations of ‘Nye, fighting for socialism’. Rathbone, who had no such praise-singers, went home to apologise to her cat, Smuts, for her use of the word ‘feline’. After Somerville, she had returned to do ...”

“... old man mumbled something unconvincing about property prices. Why did the quintessentially English Michael Moorcock nominate the second Confederate governor of Texas’s mansion in Bastrop, thirty miles out of Austin, as a suitable estate for his tax exile? Only the cats know. Spooky, over-refined Egyptian beasts who are let out on a leash while the dew is on ...”

“... 305 (Modern Period) of Malcolm’s undergraduate education, made up of Forster, Shaw, Beerbohm, Woolf, Strachey, James, Eliot and Lawrence. When Stevenson published a 50th birthday poem in the TLS, it evoked for Malcolm ‘a society of remarkable people meeting in each other’s burnished houses and talking about literature and ideas in their quiet, kind ...”

“... of a terminal disease), and novelists have tried hard – and in the case of someone like Virginia Woolf all too obviously – to avoid creating the novel’s all too solid artificial worlds. Dostoevsky does not appear to try; his genius just seems to make it happen that way. But in fact he tried very hard indeed. No novelist is more theoretical; none examined ...”

“... which judges can build’. These fixed terms of imprisonment are a direct snub to Lord Woolf, the Lord Chief Justice, who last year published a directive for judges recommending 15 years as the minimum term for the most serious categories of murder. The proposed new legislation allows judges only a vestigial role. If they wish to deviate from the ...”

“... descendant of the parrot given to Shakespeare in 1610 as a gift by his friend and fellow poet Michael Drayton. The Bard was exceedingly fond of the bird, and would speak to her as one might write in a journal – to chronicle, reflect and confess. When he died of fever six years later, Anne Hathaway kept the parrot, and introduced into its cage a younger ...”

“... appreciation of the art of our time than Picasso the Charlatan. But the curious fact is that when Michael Ayrton in the Fifties or John Berger in the Sixties tried to react to the generally unctuous tone of what passed for Picasso criticism, they produced essays which rebounded more on themselves than on Picasso, though these are among the finest writers on ...”

“... everyone rushed home to describe the occasion for posterity. Following one such meeting Virginia Woolf duly noted her impression of the tall young man: ‘A loose-jointed mind, misty, clouded, suffusive.’ This doesn’t seem too wide of the mark, especially if one thinks that a certain loose-jointedness may be a merit in a poet’s mind. Auden called him ...”

“... The nation divided always has the BBC on the rack,’ Michael Swann, then chair of the BBC governors, told a meeting of irate Tory backbenchers in 1971. The MPs were unhappy about the BBC’s coverage of Northern Ireland, which, though fastidiously cautious, they deemed insufficiently patriotic. Swann’s line came from a draft, written four years earlier, of a report for the governors eventually published as Broadcasting and the Public Mood and intended to outline the corporation’s approach to the social and political turbulence of the 1960s ...”

“... define the issues the court then takes charge of the means by which they are to be canvassed. Lord Woolf, who is reviewing the whole of civil procedure for the Lord Chancellor, is known to be thinking about such a move. If so, high on the agenda will be the question of expert witnesses. The existing power of a court to appoint its own expert is in mothballs ...”

“... literary and artistic worlds: his maternal grandfather was Ford Madox Brown, his uncle William Michael Rossetti. The only possible career for the children of these classes was that of a genius. Ford’s Rossetti cousins had written Greek dramas at the ages of five, nine and fourteen respectively. It became his duty always to aspire to consequence. ‘To me ...”