“... with the ramifications of crisis, and a literary novel had to hedge its bets. The first chapter of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library contains a carefully managed piece of future-proofing: ‘My life was in a strange way that summer, the last summer of its kind there was ever to be. I was riding high on sex and self-esteem – it was my time, my ...”

“... But even his strongest critics will enjoy the splendidly intemperate emails to Mark Thompson, Alan Yentob and their ilk in which he set about the hopeless task of urging them to fly economy. Ever since the series W1A appeared, BBC managers have become a national joke. The problem is structural. Many start out as capable and engaged producers but they can ...”

“... there was the drinking. Bruce died in 1974. After an interval, his widow gave his papers to Nigel Jones, whose 1991 biography of Hamilton was followed two years later by a less substantial Life written by Sean French. Between them, these biographers raised their subject to his current position as the go-to guy for shabby-genteel, pub-dwelling pre-colour ...”

“... strains of legitimising overseas conquest. Political Shakespeare ends with a series of essays by Alan Sinfield, Graham Holderness and Margot Heinemann which analyse the propagation of the Shakespeare myth in modern Britain in the theatre, the cinema, television and the schools. The gradual replacement in all these areas of the old stiffly patriotic ...”

“... countryman, who notices morning frost, a caterpillar looped in the road, sunset on the fells. Alan Bold overstates the case for Neill in his introduction, but this is the man’s sixth collection and it does seem remarkable that he is not known in England, even by exiled Scots. It can’t, however, surprise Neill, who would feel uncomfortable if ‘yon ...”

“... selling ‘Never Kissed a Tory’ T-shirts. They have generated so much fuss that in 2018 Owen Jones had to make clear: ‘If you want to kiss Tories, Momentum are not going to stop you.’ However, to large swathes of the left, the idea of doing so has remained anathema (the former lord mayor of Sheffield ruled it out, in his ‘Ten Commandments’ for ...”

“... answer to Hollywood-Sodom. In the shorter term, once the third Luke Skywalker and second Indiana Jones episodes are done with, Lucas intends to branch out in two directions. A year ago, he joined forces with Atari to make brighter and better video games. The combination is bound to succeed on an enormous scale. And the attraction of simulation games – as ...”

“... from him of his arrangements in Hull – principally the depth of his involvements with Monica Jones and Maeve Brennan, walk-on grotesques as far as Amis was concerned – and can’t have been pleased by hints here and there of Larkin’s reservations about the Amis works and life. In Amis’s correspondence with Conquest, and more covertly in his Memoirs ...”

“... in 1951; five years later, Hancock’s Half Hour introduced two brilliant writers, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who between them created a character whose sense of social and intellectual confinement puts The Lavender Hill Mob’s bullion robbers in the shade and eventually – after Hancock had morphed into Harold Steptoe – blossomed into something like ...”

“... of viral decimation, with breakthroughs commercial and institutional (or both, in the case of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, which won the Booker Prize). At the same time the market for literary fiction has shrunk, and writers who were perhaps thrilled when bookshops began to have Gay and Lesbian sections were soon dismayed to find that their ...”

“... paralyse your judgment? (I attempted some such mischief in my novel Box Hill.) Discussing Alan Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star when it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994, Germaine Greer remarked that reaction to the novel would have been rather different if the narrator’s love object, the young man whose tutor he is, had been ...”

“... faith.’ Whether Harold Nicolson, inviting Osbert Sitwell, Raymond Mortimer, Peter Quennell and Alan Pryce-Jones to contribute to its pages, saw the ‘new faith’ in the same light as Mosley isn’t quite clear. ‘Week by week,’ Mosley exclaimed on the front page, ‘we shall put before you new vistas into the ...”

“... after she embarked on her career as Dorothy Richardson, experimental novelist, she became Mrs Alan Odle, wife of an eccentric, sickly and impoverished artist and illustrator, 15 years her junior. The competing demands of these two roles fill her letters and are pointed to by Richardson as the reason almost every volume of Pilgrimage contains sections that ...”

“... potentially lethal; hence all those deaths. In his Introduction to Monopolies of Loss, Adam Mars-Jones argues against the automatic linking of Aids and homosexuality, ‘as if epidemic and orientation were synonymous’, and wonders whether ‘the truly responsible thing to do now would be to write sexy nostalgic fiction set in the period before the ...”

“... was an unfortunate pedagogue pilloried in schoolboy sketches by Jarry and his friends; or of Alan Coren’s Idi Amin, who amid his slaughtering pranks sends up ‘fo’ de Boys Own Paper Giant Packet o’ One Hunnerd Top Worl’ Stamps fo’ A Mere Shillin”, orders his radio equipment from Hamleys, and wants a cowboy suit for his ‘birfday’. The ...”