“... are not lies’. He gives us Casanova and Kim Philby, Shere Hite on faking orgasms, and Bernard Shaw on the need to lie to children. The publishers tell us the editor has included one wholly invented entry, and promised a bottle of champagne to the first five reviewers who spot it. I have failed to do so: but I am sure their offer is in good faith, and if ...”

“... monsters like Zavenyagin and Maltsev, from sages like David Lilienthal to bumblers like Milton Shaw, from grey eminences like Edward Bridges to flamboyant publicists like Homi Bhabha. They may at times seem like pasteboard cut-outs, with stereotyped features brushed on, but one easily recognises some very remarkable characters in this army of crusaders. It ...”

“... of light entertainment broadcasting in the 1950s. He once introduced a talk by George Bernard Shaw. ‘Young man,’ Shaw said, pointing to the microphone, ‘this is a devilish contraption. You can’t deceive it – so don’t try.’ Gamlin later said he remembered all his life the genial advice ...”

“... and reliable’. The volume has attractive and well-chosen photographs, notably one of a posturing Shaw rehearsing his cast in Androcles and another of the Evelyn Waugh family warily grouped at their garden gate. Gertrude Lawrence is pictured twice, once in her own right, once with Coward. The trawl is ...”

“... their families to the coast. The inspiration behind the scheme was George Lansbury, the subject of John Shepherd’s biography, a book as meticulous as it is generous. It is nonetheless timely: just as the prison service has brown-filled this pleasant site, so, too, New Labour has trampled on the radical socialism of which Lansbury was one of the finest ...”

“... Hoffmann, Byron, Kierkegaard (the aesthetic v. the ethical) and Richard Strauss, to Shaw and Eric Linklater. The sociological aspects of the ever-interesting topic are not neglected. Taking his tip from the 354 acknowledged bastards of Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, Roy Porter paints a picture of universal libertinism ...”

“... he was always a storyteller for boys, in the tradition (a very good one) of R.L. Stevenson and John Buchan. In A Sort of Life, which was as near to an autobiography as he was ever prepared to go (and itself the result of psychotherapy for a period of writer’ block), Greene tells how he first came to keep a record of his dreams. Though it’ not at all ...”

“... English writers of the day. His social and political writings are more hard-hitting than those of Shaw, who greatly admired him. Cunninghame Graham’s speech on Scottish independence, delivered on 21 June 1930, in its range and humanity and historical perspective is as incisively relevant today as it ever was. His maiden speech in the House of ...”

“... clarity of seeing, an acknowledgment that this is what painting is. Just as the young John Richardson, visiting Braque’s studio for the first time, felt that he had arrived ‘at the very heart of painting’. But these apparently quiet artists often turn out to have been more far-sighted and more radical than we assume. Corot, for example, once ...”

“... included Alan Bullock (recipient of a self-righteous Orwell memo), William Empson and John Morris (both of whom wrote elegant memoirs of Orwell at the BBC); he employed Nye Bevan, Richard Acland, J.B.S. Haldane, T.S. Eliot, Quintin Hogg, Bernard Shaw; he led a BBC party, that included Guy Burgess, to a special ...”

“... a suitable choice. Hesketh Pearson, who wrote the best biography before this one, was advised by Shaw not to attempt it. For, as he saw it, everything that could be said had already been said – by Frank Harris and others, including Shaw himself; and although Wilde was ‘incomparably great as a raconteur, and as a ...”

“... in a way that could not be done with real American poets – Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery. She even places Lowell inside a critical trope. ‘The New Critical doctrine that every poem is a little drama built around a central paradox is ... in the very fabric of their lives ... especially Lowell, whose life is the emblem of New Critical ...”

“... she finds human beings smelly and unpleasant. Other 20th-century authors have rewritten Candide: Shaw in his Black Girl in Search of God, Nathanael West in A Cool Million, Terry Southern in Candy. Zeldin’s engagement with specifically historical problems gives his book a character peculiarly its own. But its rather wistful and playful imaginings can often ...”

“... a head early in 1982 when both the Deputy Editor, Charles Douglas-Home, and the Managing Editor, John Grant, tendered their resignations. The Chairman refused to accept them, and instead asked Evans for his resignation and appointed Douglas-Home to succeed him. After a few days of disorder on the editorial floor, when Evans declared that he was not resigning ...”

“... to their discussions. Luckily there seems to be no such attempt: a cultural eminence such as Fiona Shaw, one of the 2006 judges, strongly resistant to dilution, would be hard to refract safely away from recognisability. So Lost for Words can be acquitted of being a roman à clef, the type of novel Milan Kundera compared to a jacket that everyone immediately ...”