“... innuendo, gossip and speculation surrounds nuggets of fact. When Feltrinelli went to Bolivia he ‘may just have gone to visit Guevara’s best French friend, Régis Debray, in a Bolivian jail at the time’. (Who is to say? Not Claire Sterling, apparently.) Feltrinelli is the target of a particularly unpleasant kind of sexual mockery. Born with ‘a ...”

“... and Radclyffe Hall, with her lover Una Troubridge, thought of taking a cottage in Rye. She may have felt some disappointment, having planned her novel in a crusader’s spirit. She claimed to have written the first full-length treatment in English of women who loved women. In Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer, she said, ‘the subject was only ...”

“... was not so much a work of tenacious parody or stomping satire as a pretty good leg-pull: which may be why the London Review of Books, when the letters were published in 1979, called them ‘a disgrace to publishing’. I liked the jape. Or at least, I liked maybe two-thirds of it. Because once you realised what Root was up to and how he made the joke work ...”

“... be said about their place in the history of the English Church. They illuminate the attitudes of Richard Bancroft, soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury, who showed plenty of sympathy for a group of moderately anti-Papist but episcopalian Catholic priests and none at all for Presbyterian, or even non-Presbyterian, promoters of the ‘pretended holy ...”

“... there was Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, an adagio from Haydn, a speech by Richard Wollheim, and no fewer than 13 of Spender’s own poems, read by Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, James Fenton, Jill Balcon and Barry Humphries. (At Larkin’s, there were three.) Spender’s order of service, despite his obvious absence, seems to acknowledge ...”

“... this recovery of ‘circumstance’ has an invigorating effect on the myths Warner examines. It may be that historical time is richer in the contradiction and instability that keep myths vital than the unchanging Dreamtime or Time of Origins (‘illo tempore’) designated as the true locus of myth by Mircea Eliade. Or perhaps it is simply that Warner is ...”

“... drew on arguments the kings themselves had to make in order to raise taxes and fund their wars. As Richard Tuck has suggested, it may have been Charles himself who opened the door to democracy in England. Levying an ancient tax on coastal towns (ship money) to fund a naval expedition against the Dutch, the Crown made the ...”

“... also have our own supersized mindfuck when it comes to the accumulating and spaffing of cash. You may not believe it, as the cost of living crisis rages and the planet boils, but London – having just lost its status as Russia’s favourite laundromat – is now the private jet capital of Europe. ‘The obvious reason that private airlines have done so well ...”

“... and horrible. Few people, after all, think about philosophers much, and some of those who do may well regard them with a mildly bemused respect. But the subject does collect a familiar style of complaint: that philosophy gets no answers, or no answers to any question that any grown-up person would worry about, or no answer which would be worth worrying ...”

“... toffs. Eliot, who had come to see the village from which one of his ancestors – Andrew Eliot – may have set off for America in the 17th century, was indeed seeking to find a kinship with this still somewhat feudal community. Yet the next sentence of his letter makes it clear he was unsettled to find that the ‘cousin of mine’ in East Coker was not ...”

“... I did it. It was a painful business, as the writing of books tends to be. It is true that there may be in one’s life a book that beautifully offers itself, pleading to be taken, simply to be written down, but like other such offers, this one is made only, I think, when one is fairly young. Most of us are self-sentenced to a year or more of un-epiphanic ...”

“... Swann’s Way offers the refreshingly simple ‘Time was when I always went to bed early’, while Richard Howard proposes going into print with ‘Time and again, I have gone to bed early.’ One can argue the toss indefinitely over the respective strengths of these different renderings. Grieve’s ‘Time was’ and Howard’s ‘Time and again’ have the ...”

“... unashamed fan of minor Hollywood pictures. Breathless, as Godard readily admitted, was inspired by Richard Quine’s Pushover and could be seen as the direct sequel to Otto Preminger’s Bonjour tristesse. The central character of the film, the petty criminal played by Belmondo, modelled his self-image on that of Humphrey Bogart in Mark Robson’s The Harder ...”

“... Hawthorne on the American romance to Henry James on Nathaniel Hawthorne to Lionel Trilling and Richard Chase staking out the ground for American exceptionalism in the postwar United States, the problem for the writer of American fiction famously posed itself as a deficit: ‘no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong’ (Ellison ...”

“... stone in a peach and it must exist before one can ever begin to start thinking constructively. In May he decided to have a break and, on a friend’s recommendation, took a boat from Narragansett to Block Island. There he saw the charred remains of the Ocean View Hotel, which had once claimed to have the world’s longest bar – 101 stools – and hosted the ...”