“... in any way. Amis is mentioned in Hugh Kenner’s A Sinking Island – which is to say that like Hughes and Heaney his name appears briefly without discussion (Larkin himself gets a dismissive page or two); and they all feature as examples of what happens to a culture when it gives way to its own philistinism. The presupposition seems to be that British ...”

“... a car plant in Britain if Labour won the election, which was a lie; the Express said that Robert Hughes MP was affiliated to the Soviet Friendship Society, which was another lie; the Sun tried to swing the Chesterfield by-election with a fraudulent ‘psychiatric analysis’ of Tony Benn. Henry Porter, once again displaying a complete disregard for personal ...”

“... debatable. It’s a shocking story, with one of the victims having been battered almost to death. David Cameron is quick to move in and claim the crime is evidence of ‘a broken society’, conveniently ignoring the fact that Edlington, the village in question, is smack in the middle of what was a mining community, a society systematically broken by Mrs ...”

“... forty years. In Australia he had made the image of the diminutive, irascible Prime Minister Billy Hughes practically his own property; within a very few months of coming to London he had done the same for Lloyd George, so that by 1921, as Arnold Bennett said, his cuddly, bemused Prime Minister, irresponsible but irrepressible, had already ousted all previous ...”

“... to wander, our batteries go dead, our hearing-aid ceases to function. I have to say what Professor David Minter is far too sensitive a critic not to know well, often hints but never says outright. Large regions of Faulkner’s novels are inaudible. In the racing sense as well as the literary sense let us have a glance at his form in that alleged masterpiece ...”

“... some of the sources used by orthodox contemporary histories of the Transportation System. Robert Hughes’s discussion of the Port Arthur penal colony could almost be a description of Jorgensen’s chronicle – although Hughes’s tone, predictably, is rather less admiring than Gould’s: To scrutinise the punishment ...”

“... out of a difficult life is an idea that some moderns have endorsed. In his ‘Essay on Suicide’, David Hume thought it would be strange for God to deny us an option that even a malaria mosquito could inflict; Georges Poulet disagreeably proclaimed that death by one’s own hand is the only act that avoids the twin perils of a meaningless existence and a ...”

“... of nearly a hundred thousand people attending his funeral in Belfast. One week later, Francis Hughes died, and eight more men – Patsy O’Hara, Raymond McCreesh, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee and Michael Devine – starved themselves to death in the months that followed. During that summer of 1981, the ...”

“... devotee of the Bond books.) The author of Moscow Gold, ‘John Salisbury’, is in propria persona David Caute, present literary editor of the New Statesman. I don’t give anything away here, since the fact was divulged, with much nudging and winking, in the ‘Londoner’s Diary’ column of the Evening Standard – where the marriage of Barnes and Kavanagh ...”

“... the United States and the Vatican, to do something. On 12 May a second hunger striker, Francis Hughes, died. The families of the other strikers started to worry that the British were going to let them all die. Brendan McFarlane, the IRA leader in the Maze, warned Gerry Adams: ‘It appears they are not interested in simply undermining us, but completely ...”

“... out of the way. No great surprise, but how come it leaked out now? A little while later Beverley Hughes announced that she, too, will be going. That is a surprise, given that she is so far unscathed and might reasonably have expected preferment. Then Tom Watson in the Cabinet Office announced that he, too, would be leaving. As if all that wasn’t ...”

“... that her real name is June Hovick. Another one was Danny Kaye, and we found out his real name was David Daniel Kamirsky ... There is one who calls himself Edward G. Robinson. His real name is Emanuel Goldenberg. There is another one here who calls himself Melvyn Douglas whose name is Melvyn Desselberg. There are others too numerous to mention. They are ...”

“... who write poetry of home are often aware of its dangers though they may not always avoid them. David Dabydeen’s ‘Coolie Odyssey’, dedicated ‘for Ma’, and included in Section One of the four-part ‘alternative’ anthology, The New British Poetry, opens: Now that peasantry is in vogue, Poetry bubbles from peat bogs, People strain for the old ...”

“... on peoples accustomed to the autonomy afforded them by Ottoman weakness. ‘It was evident,’ David Fromkin wrote in his fascinating study A Peace to End All Peace (1989), ‘that London either was not aware of, or had given no thought to, the population mix of the Mesopotamian provinces.’ Gertrude Bell was certainly familiar with the population mix of ...”

“... other people became stalwarts of a kind, didn’t they? Hugo Williams?Oh, they came in. David Harsent was another.Peter Dale?I think we published some of his poems. He never became quite one of the gang. There was a certain amount of indecision about him then. David Harsent appeared from nowhere. I think via the ...”