“... Henry James) mocked me for my taste, reminding me of Shelley’s description of Wordsworth in ‘Peter Bell the Third’ as ‘a solemn and unsexual man’. Never afraid of being thought either solemn or unsexual I persevered, and even persuaded my history teacher to allow me to do an extended A-Level essay on Wordsworth’s political beliefs. I chugged ...”

“... preparing to mark the centenary of The Waste Land’s publication. When Christopher Ricks reviewed Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Eliot in the LRB (1 November 1984; the same year Michael Hastings’s play about Eliot’s first marriage was staged), he remarked: ‘Plainly it is the Tom and Viv bits which we are all likely to home in on.’ In 2022, with the ...”

“... him in America in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, which is more pungently caught in the oral biography Peter Manso produced in 1985, yet Lennon often puts his finger on the kind of detail that makes sense of Mailer’s character. Pearl Kazin (Alfred Kazin’s sister) was an editor at Harper’s Bazaar and her manner was said to be quite superior. She deployed it ...”

“... dealing with the way capitalism crushes the bodies and souls of workers. When Hannah Arendt read it in the 1950s, she thought it was the best thing ever written on the subject.In August 1936, Weil crossed the Spanish border and made her way to Barcelona. There she managed to join a group of international volunteers in the small town of Pina de ...”

“... misfit returns to roots where eccentricity is normal; nightmares of two disturbed little girls peter out; urban loser finds fulfilment in harsh eden; new love arrives on tentative gull’s feet; tide of familial happiness seeps in. But although the narrative formula may be trite (Little House on the Prairie Goes to Newfoundland; The Waltons Put Out to ...”

“... Even so, it’s odd that Cecil Beaton should have decided that she might be his. Odd, until you read Souhami’s description of the world Beaton created at his farmhouse, Ashcombe, in Wiltshire. ‘He filled the place with lifesized cupids, silver and gilt candlesticks, silver bird cages, glass balls, engraved mirrors, shell pictures, crumbling Italian ...”

“... Colored Orphan Asylum; elsewhere, blacks were lynched and their property destroyed. The novelist Peter Quinn has identified this moment as crucial for the Irish: it was a fight between two disadvantaged groups to see who was going to wind up bottom of the heap. The Irish won but, judging by Bainbridge Avenue, the war is not over. Though undoubtedly the ...”

“... if in a floral arrangement, commissioned by pious ladies of the city: the long bones arranged to read as glorifying legends, the shoulder-blades in rosettes, the skulls in columns wearing embroidered visors in purple and gold (now rather dusty). All these will be gathered, sorted and reclothed in flesh. Jacopus da Voragine imagines the martyr James the ...”

“... it is the familiar tale with black sauce. The editor’s warning that the letters should be read for entertainment not truth is perhaps superfluous. In this feast of irresponsibility she is ready to puncture with a neat footnote the more wounding nonsenses. She cannot let Mitford get away with imputing ‘intense cowardice’ to Lady Derby for not ...”

“... the fastidious Blunt would surely have quickly buckled. The traffic was not all one way, however. Read The Storm Birds and you realise that for all the holes in its security, the West had coups of its own. At first there were crucial differences. Not until the Sixties did we have real moles within the Soviet apparatus. The prize British and American catches ...”

“... prefer to Gittings’s biography a later one by Michael Millgate, which is said to be (I haven’t read it) more temperate and more boring, at all events more compassionate. A second rearguard action is mounted by Peter J. Casagrande (he’s American, and thanks the General Research Fund of the University of Kansas), who ...”

“... approach here is to cut the Vikings down to size. This is the method associated with the name of Peter Sawyer and it has brought some striking and happily controversial results. An alternative is to exploit hitherto neglected types of evidence, in particular royal charters, in order to look more closely at the work of earlier kings, both in Mercia (after ...”

“... new publications from the States: Mailer, His Life and Times, by (that means ‘transcribed by’) Peter Manso, and Conversations with Capote by (can this be the correct spelling?) Lawrence Grobel.1 Each book goes far, and unpleasantly, beyond mere feet-kissing, and each offers a neat image of the sort of literary-critical milieu in which the Mailers and ...”

“... that Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children was ‘one of the best novels I have ever read’. There is something endearing about that. The impression of a disembodied intelligence remains, as strong in the letters as it must have been in life. Observing that he had ‘the most glittering IQ you ever met’, William Barrett at Partisan Review said ...”

“... of the day. Mr Macmillan knew that prestige and confidence radiate outwards. The public does not read Hansard, as it is supposed to have done – though I do not believe it – in the 19th century, but the man – or woman – who dominates the House does in some mysterious unanalysable way make an imprint on the country. It is not easy to say just how this ...”