“... for a reference for a gamekeeper. The magazine sort of launched me on a career, because Alan Pryce-Jones, who was then the editor of the TLS, gave me a lot of reviewing work. AH: How did you see your future then? FW: I suppose I feebly wanted to be a writer, but, apart from those stories, I couldn’t think what on earth I was going to do. I got my first job ...”

“... the TLS’s existence, The Wings of the Dove was reviewed by Constance Fletcher, who wondered how James’s novel would do ‘for short railway journeys and drowsy hammocks’, and Youth (which contained Heart of Darkness), reviewed by William Beach Thomas, who had robustly little time for Conrad’s dense pessimism. Two years later, on Chekhov’s ...”

“... for the status of a particular form of non-standard English in the way that, say, the novels of James Kelman or the poems of Linton Kwesi Johnson are. But Agu’s voice is authentic in the more important sense that it conveys an impression of a fully developed human consciousness, however damaged. It is also true to Agu’s experience; the use of the ...”

“... global picture, and its most eye-catching economic strategy is a further reduction of welfare. Ros Jones, narrowly re-elected as mayor of Doncaster, warned that Labour’s cut to pensioners’ winter fuel allowance had become emblematic of its approach; a few Labour backbenchers – most prominently Louise Haigh – have broken cover to join the criticism and ...”

“... Gerald and Rachel, and their children, Toby and Catherine. He is about to start a PhD on Henry James’s style at UCL. Toby Fedden was a contemporary of Nick’s at university: they weren’t exactly friends, but Nick had a crush on him. Gerald is the newly elected Tory MP for Barwick, a town in Northamptonshire – Nick’s home-town, as it happens. In ...”

“... conflict of interest in simultaneously being agent and employer.’ When the actress Jennifer Jones’s alcoholic first husband died after an injection given by a dodgy psychiatrist, Selznick, who was in love with her and would marry her after a decent interval, was desperate to manage the publicity. He got his way by creating a cover story saying that it ...”

“... place before he was born. He was the great-grandchild of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Edward Burne-Jones, and was thus connected with both the Kipling and the Baldwin families; he was the grandson of an Oxford Professor of Poetry (of no great distinction, it must be admitted); and the son of Angela Thirkell, the novelist of upper-class English life, and ...”

“... go through these doors in a weekend, many may dimly remember that it was the owner of this club, James Palumbo, who gave a car, a Rover, to Peter Mandelson MP, to help the cause. It is here, at the suitably messianic Ministry of Sound, that the Use Your Vote campaign is organised. Much of the music inside will come from Creation Records, the label which ...”

“... So the son rebels yet more strongly against the English Establishment, the Court of St James, as substitute for a tyrant father, and then overpraises a foreign potentate, as an alternative father. It is a pretty theory. I remembered it when talking with Malcolm Muggeridge recently about Kim Philby. Muggeridge was asserting that Philby’s treason ...”

“... easier to understand. A video, too, was in some quarters said to be to blame for the killing of James Bulger in 1993. But once again, the willingness to accept this had to do with the extent to which Child’s Play 3 provided in the figure of Chucky a fictional precedent for Robert Thompson and Jon Venables: not an inspiration to the children, but an ...”

“... of Larkin’s life were still unavailable, especially most of the letters written to Monica Jones, a lecturer at the University of Leicester, who was his closest companion and lover, but never wife. The publication, in 2010, of Letters to Monica, edited by Anthony Thwaite, changed the earlier impression of Larkin’s mind and personality, especially the ...”

“... a witty and domineering abolitionist, represented by an extraordinary black wig that has Tommy Lee Jones underneath it. Jones gets craggier with every film he is in, his face, as Woody Allen might say, a combination of Gertrude Stein’s and some local mountain. He manages to be funny and bleak without any sense of ...”

“... Two months after Tennyson’s death Burne-Jones was reluctantly following the instructions of the poet’s widow and son in repainting the portrait of Tennyson as a young man which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Emily Tennyson had never liked the picture, perhaps in part because she also disliked Edward FitzGerald, who had originally commissioned it from Samuel Laurence ...”

“... for a future novelist. Persistent rumours that she was not the daughter of George Frederic Jones but the illegitimate offspring of a Scottish peer or an English tutor clearly attest to a sense that there was something otherwise inexplicable about this ambitious daughter of Old New York. Her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), says nothing about ...”

“... defaced the beauties and distorted the stories. We have to imagine King David denouncing the King James Bible on the grounds that James was a ‘faggot’ and insisting that there was nothing faggotty about his own friendship with Jonathan. He quotes David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan, only to interrupt it with: ‘You ...”