“... the Rose Street milieu of 1950s Edinburgh. For a time, Brown mixed there with Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig, Sydney Goodsir Smith and other poets and literati. With its prostitutes and smoky, male-dominated pubs sporting signs which stated ‘Women Not Supplied’, Rose Street was a shithole of gender politics, emblematic in some ways of the Edinburgh ...”

“... of French Left intellectuals after the war, as Anne’s forced choice of DeBreuilh over Lewis Brogan parallels DeBreuilh’s forced break with Henri and choice of the Soviet Union over the United States. Although Beauvoir always denied (unconvincingly) that the three major French characters were stand-ins for Sartre, Camus and herself, she announced ...”

“... Lawrence was fascinated and disgusted by him in equal measure. They met through the novelist Norman Douglas whom Lawrence had known years earlier as an assistant editor on the English Review and who was now established in Florence where he dedicated himself principally to pederasty. (According to Huxley, his conversation turned exclusively on boys, sex ...”

“... Colley, Meehan Crist, Anne Enright, Lorna Finlayson, Lisa Hallgarten and Jayne Kavanagh, Sophie Lewis, Maureen N. McLane, Erin Maglaque, Gazelle Mba, Azadeh Moaveni, Toril Moi, Joanne O’Leary, Niela Orr, Lauren Oyler, Susan Pedersen, Jacqueline Rose, Madeleine Schwartz, Arianne Shahvisi, Sophie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Spawls, Amia ...”

“... to be let alone.Two instances illustrate this to perfection, and both involve his friend and ally Lewis Namier. In the Salmagundi interview, Berlin said of the problem of assimilation:Sir Lewis Namier explained this extremely clearly. He said that Eastern European Judaism was a frozen mass until the rays of the Western ...”

“... aired and some understanding achieved. Contrast this with Question Time on BBC 1 last night with Norman Tebbit, Shirley Williams and some unidentified industrialist. Tebbit played his usual role of a sneer on legs, snarling and heaping contempt on any vaguely liberal view and the discussion, which was no discussion at all, was rancorous and rowdy and left ...”

“... peers of both Modernists and Georgians; and no reader could then have been blamed for thinking Day-Lewis, say, as important as Auden and the same kind of poet. If in 1820 there had been an anthology of the Cockney school, the poetic romances of Keats in it would not have seemed so different from those of Leigh Hunt. Already the pages of Alvarez’s The New ...”

“... The projectionist told me personally.’ Boys’ Town was a 1938 Hollywood movie, directed by Norman Taurog and admired for Spencer Tracy’s performance as a priest who rehabilitates juvenile delinquents in a kind of camp, through what we might call ‘tough love’, but not a film that would normally be considered a masterpiece. I imagine it must have ...”

“... of American Bases. Before I agreed (and in an effort to get out of going, I suspect) I consulted Norman Dombey who (as readers of the LRB know) is well versed in nuclear politics. Not that Menwith Hill – RAF Menwith Hill, as it is euphemistically called, though it’s almost wholly American – is (yet) a nuclear base, only a satellite warning and ...”

“... title for a play: ‘The Fun to be Had with Models of Dubious Sensibility’.30 July. Jessye Norman has been appearing at the Barbican. She is touchy about her size, and having difficulty getting into a small aeroplane, is supposed to have been told by air hostess to try getting in sideways. ‘Lady,’ she is said to have remarked, ‘I ain’t got no ...”

“... in Wabansia Avenue was, she explained in Force of Circumstance, ‘very much like the one Anne and Lewis spent together in The Mandarins’, the novel dedicated to Algren: ‘embarrassment, impatience, misunderstanding, fatigue, and finally the intoxication of deep understanding’. The next day he gave her a ‘clunky silver band’, as Bair calls it, a ...”

“... herself employed in speaking with Virginia Moore and Ellmann,’ Saddlemyer writes. In 1961, when Norman Jeffares was writing his introduction to Yeats’s Selected Poems, she wrote to him: ‘I dislike your use of the word “Fake” . . . I told you this before & you had a happier phrasing in your book. However, I cannot ask you to alter this. The word ...”

“... described by MacNeice’s poem is a nexus of relationships rather than a place apart. It has a Norman castle, a Scottish quarter and an Irish quarter (‘a slum for the blind and halt’). MacNeice, as ‘the rector’s son’, was ‘born to the anglican order,/Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor’. Up the lane, at the lodge of an army ...”

“... strange contingencies and fantasies but has very little to do with actual genealogical practice. Norman Rockwell’s 1959 cover for the Saturday Evening Post, Family Tree, has at the top of the tree an impeccably white baby – not surprising – one far whiter than might be expected from the swarthy and often disreputable ancestry sprouting up from the ...”

“... before?Not a biographer. I’d written studies, including a biographical thing about the poet Alun Lewis years earlier.I remember that: it was the preface of the collection of his stories and poems you edited.Yes, it’s quite a long piece. It took ages and involved the conventional sort of research, going to see his widow and so on. I’d done that many years ...”