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“... a programme about literary life in Britain during the Second World War; the contributors included John Betjeman and Cyril Connolly. The show was stolen, however, by a figure in a voluminous overcoat and dark glasses, whose recollections were delivered slowly, deadpan, between puffs on a large cigar. A month later, at the age of 52, Julian Maclaren-Ross died ...”

“... many of them) that Amis received: several hundred from Robert Conquest, Anthony Powell, John Betjeman, Philip Larkin and others. These letters help supply the answers to niggling editorial puzzles: for example, the identity of ‘Bluebell’ (Conquest’s dog), or ‘engine driver Hunt’, from a passage in a letter reading ‘Praed, Hood, Gilbert ...”

“... if a clientele is indifferent to one item, it will be gratified by the next. Thus, in the Sinclair-Stevenson list, the admirable William Scammell (Five Easy Pieces) has to rub shoulders with poets whose every move shrieks its discordance with his. The Carcanet list that houses Patricia Beer is a good deal more harmonious; but it features ...”

“... brother Walter. He now immersed himself in British and American literature: Robert Louis Stevenson, Melville, above all Kipling. He became the leading figure in a bohemian gang who wrote and sang songs together, drank, chased girls and shocked respectable burghers. He narrowly avoided being expelled from school: a teacher argued in his defence that ...”

“... was in Oxford when he first encountered the living dead. One autumn night in 1869, he passed John Conington, professor of Latin, staring silently at Corpus Christi College. Nothing odd about a distracted don, except that Lang soon learned that Conington had, at that moment, been breathing his last in Boston, Lincolnshire. Years later, he discussed this ...”

“... the J.C. Squire literary atmosphere, which Dunn summons up by a pretence of       being a John Buchan of the underdog With my waistcoated breast puffed against the wind. And yet however well organised it is, much of the overt ‘feeling’ in these poems, as in many of those in the anthology, remains second-hand, not truly sui generis; and the reason ...”

“... most suspicious circumstances, vied with McCarthy in his denunciations of Truman, Acheson, Adlai Stevenson and many others, as the leaders of a Red conspiracy which was seeking to submerge America. On no occasion requiring political courage did President Eisenhower show himself to be courageous. Thomas Reeves, the latest historian of McCarthyism, is very ...”

“... a great personage, there is a need to look elsewhere for a more discriminating view. Inevitably, John Grigg’s biography of Lloyd George invites such comparisons and they redound almost wholly to Grigg’s credit, except in one obvious respect: beginning at much the same time, Gilbert actually finished the job, albeit reinforced in his labours by a research ...”

“... is evoked in the novel’s epigraph from the famously unsettled Robert Louis Stevenson: The tropics vanish, and meseems that I, From Halkerside, from topmost Allmuir, Or steep Caerketton; dreaming gaze again.                         Songs of Travel This is the nature of the voyage for the Scots on board Ardent ...”

“... La mimica degli antichi (1832)... to the more casual observations of foreign travellers like John Evelyn, who recorded at least one insulting gesture (biting the finger) which the two lexicographers missed. In the second place, Italian judicial archives often note the gestures of insult leading to cases of assault and battery, and (among other ...”

“... in the divorce courts did not strike him as gentlemanly. What changed his life was the success of Stevenson’s Treasure Island, which he felt he could at least emulate. In idle youthful hours he had dabbled in séances and the ‘mysterious’; he was credulous about reincarnation, poltergeists and the irregular behaviour of mummies. His challenge to ...”

“... Hugh Benson, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen Seaman, G.M. Trevelyan, H.G. Wells and Israel Zangwill ...”

“... Wittgenstein’s. The third member of Rorty’s liberating trinity is – surprisingly – John Dewey, for whom Rorty claims the honour of having understood the importance for the general culture of making essentially the same breach with the philosophical tradition as did Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Philosophy, then, has already undergone its crucial ...”

“... recalls it in The Fall of Kelvin Walker, subtitled ‘A Fable of the Sixties’). It occurs to John Dyson, Frayn’s downtrodden hero, that ‘failure was the secular equivalent of sin.’ But even his failure now seems like success. He and Bob Bell work out of the same office collating ‘Years Gone By’ or ‘The Country Day by Day’, duelling with ...”

“... The majority of books about John F. Kennedy have been written either by toadying family retainers or by people bent on destroying the Camelot myth. The historian Robert Dallek is neither; he decided to enter the field, as he explains in his introduction, in part because documents had become available that threw new light on several aspects of Kennedy’s life, and in part because he thought the old ones should be given a fresh reading ...”