“... in’ that day, so it was no big surprise when I was greeted at the terminal by an eager-eyed young pressman. He grabbed my suitcase with one hand and my elbow with the other and guided me off to the Press Room. Therein, dead-centre, was a small stage flooded with television lights, and on the stage a couple of black leatherette TV armchairs. An airport ...”

“... on the cover of the notorious ‘Ern Malley’ issue. Ern Malley was a poet invented by two young men who thought Modernism had destroyed the craft of verse. They compiled his poems by picking fragments at random from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, Shakespeare and a dictionary of quotations. For many Australians, this hoax confirmed that Modernism was a ...”

“... the road, she drags herself along, semi-invited, to a New Year’s Eve party at the Skidelskys (‘Robert ... is a brilliant historian who was made a lord this summer’). Needless to say, none of these occasions turns out quite as she would have wished. At the Booker dinner, she has a pretty uninspiring time next to Kingsley Amis (who deserts her for ‘more ...”

“... He sees the inauthentic everywhere: from a coffee-shop window in Soho he watches a group of young film-industry professionals, with their mobiles slipped into the back pockets of their low-slung jeans, stand about in the street, laughing and looking carefree. Entirely conscious that they’re being watched, they’re as studied as can be, as if they ...”

“... most telling anecdotes concerns the great man’s failure to amuse Jacqueline’s daughter and her young friend by wearing a red student’s cap Penrose had brought from Venice. Afterwards he sat in a room alone, weeping. ‘Whatever humour may dominate,’ Penrose writes, ‘there is always instability in P.’s mood. While in the happiest of moods, for some ...”

“... on 27 June 2024 is not how old Biden seemed but that he managed to make Trump appear relatively young. Trump was at that point the second oldest presidential candidate in American history – second only to Biden – yet Biden’s intermittently ashen, waxen, leaden, frozen performance had the effect of giving Trump a youthful glow. The ex-president looked ...”

“... for the ‘puritanism’ of his judgments, was surely right that the praise lavished on the very young poet had not exactly helped to curb the self-advertising, self-indulgent strain in his writing. Certainly, success came early and came hot. His contributions to Oxford Poetry (in 1929, when he was 20) were singled out for praise by metropolitan ...”

“... book, Final Solutions, caused a minor scandal when it was chosen to receive a small award from the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association in 1962. The national director of the YMHA asked that some possibly libellous references be removed from the manuscript; Seidel refused; the prize was revoked, the original ...”

“... of Oedipus and Electra (recall that 16-inch paternal member), the juxtaposition of the attractive young woman leered at by a faceless male multitude, then bisected by one of its number, becomes the causal chain that he needs must loop and yank through narrative after narrative. In his early novels, and in the LA Quartet to which The Black Dahlia ...”

“... but he does do a dangerous thing with his money. He leaves a lot of it, when he dies, to a young American niece. She is grateful, of course, and the money enhances her freedom – at first. It’s what she does with her freedom that darkens her world. She knows the money is not exactly to blame, but has to believe, once she has married a man who very ...”

“... this isn’t the sort of thing it’s worth worrying about in a thriller; I once read a novel by Robert Ludlum in which the hero gives his London cab driver a £100 note. Anyway, ‘a group of pro-Ukraine, anti-Russia separatists assaulted a ranch in northern Algeria where Suliman Cindoruk was believed to be hiding’ – huh? just roll with it – but they ...”

“... jar of brown whey and a bowlful of turnips and eels’.) In his role as host and counsellor to the young, Amis comments on his work in progress, like the narrator of London Fields, in interstitial chapters filled with writing advice and ‘what Gore Vidal used to call “book chat”’. The advice is enjoyably pontifical about such matters as the ‘sonic ...”

“... concedes that his continued abuse of reluctant ‘John’ shows that he did not love him), ‘Robert’ (who recognises the fraudulence of saying that ‘the boys aren’t really hurt’) and Matthew (who is ‘still very disgusted with people who want to have sex with children’) are all described by Dr Li as merely ‘ambivalent’ in ...”

“... rain as ‘grief in arrears’ is the loveliest thing in the book), or the compact subtleties of Robert Crawford, whose short poem ‘Scotland’ is infinitely more subtle and political than the work of Didsbury and McMillan or even Peter Reading. And then the sweet, rapid brocade of Glyn Maxwell’s complex forms, or the grace of Pauline Stainer. These ...”

“... the opposite: it would have been improved by more extravagant invention. The stories of a group of young men who find themselves supervising the transfer of British power in an imaginary West African colony (‘Balunda’) in the Sixties are picked up in the Eighties. They have become recognisable types, but are not distinct or amusing or even grotesque enough ...”