“... emerging Cold War foreign policy. In 1952, during their courtship, she gave King a copy of Edward Bellamy’s influential socialist novel Looking Backward (1888). She was a talented singer and attended the New England Conservatory in Boston. (Ironically, in accordance with the Supreme Court’s ‘separate but equal’ doctrine, the government of ...”

“... of prose especially? I heard a woman on the radio discussing The Wild Places and she actually said: ‘Oh, he’s so brave, I couldn’t possibly do that.’ What’s being reduced is not the health and variety of the landscape, but the variety of our engagement, our way of seeing, our languages. There are lots of people, many of them women, who live ...”

“... castration"’. Brandt himself, talking about the same picture in a film made by the BBC in 1983, said only that ‘it was the camera that produced this effect. The lens distorted everything. I never knew it would happen.’ In the context of the elaborate analysis by his critics, this answer sounds like a rebuke.The BBC film is shown on a loop as part of the ...”

“... to not sounding like he used to. John Bayley, an attentive but sceptical admirer, once shrewdly said of the early Hill manner: ‘The danger with this sort of poetry is that it is the kind that looks like poetry, which need not mean that it is not the real thing, but is bound to raise a certain sort of doubt’; and you could see the progressive roughening ...”

“... but quickly building up to such fundamental criticisms of the book that the demoralised author said he would withdraw it altogether; at which James protested and pleaded, successfully though not with any retraction of the criticisms he had made. Belchamber duly came out, in 1904, and was not well received – though perhaps for reasons other than those put ...”

“... art or to artists. He certainly regarded himself as an artist, and his own art was fiction, but he said firmly, in a broadcast of 1944, that ‘the novel . . . has not any rules and so there is no such thing as the art of fiction.’ This remark probably arose from his habitual disrespect for, or worry about, Henry James. The Ambassadors is given more ...”

“... and training. Since 1913, Jones had been the sole president of the British Society, and Edward Glover, an abrasive and unpopular man, loomed as his heir. If the main plot of this epic personal and intellectual struggle is the collision between Klein and Anna Freud, its leading subplot is the downfall of Glover. This was the outcome of a bitter ...”

“... comedy of ‘The Secret Sharer’. Conrad, who used on occasion to vie with his friend and agent Edward Garnett in yarn-spinning, told him that his tale ‘between you and me, is it ... every word fits and there’s not a single uncertain note. Luck my boy. Pure luck.’ The sense of fitness was what most impressed D.H. Lawrence, who observed of one of the ...”

“... need for passionate authorial control, of constant adverbial direction as to how sentences were said and heard. The dramatist loses so much control that he may have been glad to get back from the stage to the novelistic page, which will (apparently) accept authority. Horne also does not consider how the reputations of some of the elder novelists after their ...”

“... Herrnstein and Murray are part of the fin-de-siècle gloom movement whose adherents range from Edward Luttwak, writing powerfully in these pages on 7 April last year, to Jeremy Rifkin in The End of Work. From an abstract point of view – the vantage point of those who have high IQs and some idle time – Herrnstein and Murray have quite the neatest ...”

“... shouldn’t be long now before the voters remind us that politics, as Rab had once so originally said, is the art of the possible. Having observed her arresting qualities of domination at the previous Conservative Party Conference, I had been ridiculed for writing, in the New Statesman, that she was a great fanged and clawed feline, replete with sex and ...”

“... into the darkness and saw a red glow in the hills opposite. She asked what it was, and her mother said in a grim voice, ‘They are putting fire to Lettaidh. The people have been put out.’ The child was frightened, naturally enough, especially since they had relatives in Lettaidh themselves, but she was reassured when her mother told her it would not happen ...”

“... moves from one demolition job to another, that his own arguments often contradict each other. That said, his book is extremely clever, precisely because of its tendentious manner, the most interesting of the four books published last year to cash in on the 80th anniversary of 1918.* The English are still more than half in love with the idea of the super-clever ...”

“... Huston, who directed the film version of Reflections in a Golden Eye, and the younger playwright Edward Albee who adapted, with limited success, The Ballad of the Sad Café for the stage. ‘Illumination’ is McCullers’s term for epiphany, inspiration, insight; ‘night glare’ her term for her illnesses, bad luck, and the loss of inspiration: ‘the ...”

“... Thomas ‘Tap’ Bowles were both tremendous swells. They looked rather similar, something like Edward Elgar, and when they were in the House of Commons they worked together in a spirited, efficient and defiantly independent manner, never as lobby-fodder. Neither could be called ‘democratic’ or ‘anti-racist’; but Tap Bowles was always keen to praise ...”