“... a programme about literary life in Britain during the Second World War; the contributors included John Betjeman and Cyril Connolly. The show was stolen, however, by a figure in a voluminous overcoat and dark glasses, whose recollections were delivered slowly, deadpan, between puffs on a large cigar. A month later, at the age of 52, Julian Maclaren-Ross died ...”

“... life of Civvy Street, when the Kray Twins ruled London – or so the timorous newspapers claimed. John Dickson, a former member of the Krays’ firm, has somehow produced a well-written book, Murder without Conviction. ‘We looked like any normal businessmen in our pin-striped suits,’ he says, describing the firm’s negotiations with the Mafia. The Krays ...”

“... Donne’s powers are, for John Carey, a matter of power, the poems being ‘the most enduring exhibition of the will to power the English Renaissance produced’. The praises of Donne in this critical work of amazing flair and obduracy are single-minded: Donne is here valued, supremely, for the power and tenacity of his ego, for his imaginative energy, for his desire to dominate or his rage for supremacy, and for the obsession with which he registered the contrarieties and contradictions of life ‘in all their urgent discord ...”

“... fictive, prospective or real (floods, kidnappings, automobile accidents, the Beast of St John); fairy tales; shopping malls, hospitals, high street stores, dinner parties, graves. All these places and events can break people, or contain those who are broken. She can even put many of these things in the same poem. ‘Sensual Pleasures’ (another new ...”

“... this is a private event, and you have to go in through the media entrance. We put you people in a cage so you can’t go into the crowd and get them to say things.’ We smiled at each other. This seemed to be the most fun he’d had all day. ‘Go to the media entrance, or I’ll get the Secret Service to drag you away.’ On the way round the building, I ...”

“... hearing it spoken with his un-English, un-American accent, and reinvented as an estrangement. John Updike is a self-confessed fan, but Joyce Carol Oates, who is not, has also conducted a wonderfully ingenious argument with Nabokov in several novels including The Childwold in 1976 and her Chappaquiddick novella, Black Water, in 1992, where the question of ...”

“... There is something off-key about all these jewels and feathers, braid and enamel and gold. When John Singer Sargent’s tremendous portrait of the colonial administrator Sir Frank Swettenham inspired Rebecca West to comment that ‘he looked as if he wasn’t quite a gentleman,’ was she showing her sensitivity to the excess of his display? To the ...”

“... career of a competent civil servant. A member of the king’s household and lifelong retainer of John of Gaunt, Chaucer served as a diplomat, controller of the wool custom, clerk of the king’s works, deputy forester, justice of the peace for Kent and Member of Parliament. In addition to his large poetic corpus, we have several prose works and a few ...”

“... 13th century, and some of London Zoo’s first residents came from the Tower of London, where King John employed lion-keepers as early as 1210. John moved the royal menagerie from Woodstock Palace in Oxford; it had been formed a century earlier by Henry I, probably as a hunting reserve. The London menagerie began to flourish ...”

“... Bengal to add to his palace menagerie, she reaches out to touch the animal through the bars of its cage. Isabella, her spoilt elder sister, who likes jewels and court fashions and doesn’t listen in class, dismisses it as a boring, sleepy pet. ‘Wake up! Come on, pussycat, come on!’Fashioning Lucrezia into marriage material means trying to contain her. The ...”

“... Hawk’, but not because he wished to suggest any hint of beakiness. His predecessor had been John Squire, whose pseudonym was ‘Solomon Eagle’. It is easy enough to see why, for such as Leavis, MacCarthy might be perceived as the apotheosis of indolent metropolitan bookman-ship. Scrutiny, after all, was in some measure aimed as a ‘serious’ riposte ...”

“... chicken grabbed a card out of the deck with its beak, and a few grains of corn dropped into the cage. I don’t remember my fortune anymore, but on the bottom it said: ‘The management is not responsible for the opinions of this chicken.’ In another shed, I watched an aquacade about the sinking of Atlantis starring Ralph the Pig. After two students in ...”

“... hosts are suitably variegated: Lord Glenconner (Colin Tennant) in St Lucia; the historian Sir John Plumb (‘peppery but very entertaining’) also in St Lucia; Norman Parkinson, the photographer, in Trinidad. He visits Richard Branson’s house in the Virgin Islands, pronouncing it to be more tasteful than others he could (and does) mention. He finds ...”

“... In the summer of 1831, James Woods, master of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Wordsworth’s former tutor, decided that his college should have a portrait of its most celebrated living alumnus. He commissioned Henry William Pickersgill – an apprentice Spitalfields silk-weaver turned Royal Academician – to produce a full-length oil painting of Wordsworth in an appropriately sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal Mount ...”

“... to the glass panes of his bookcases, a symbolic gesture she saw as ‘trying to break out of his cage, escape to creation. But he never made it. He had lost his magic power over booze.’In 1932, Natalie Keaton, who had long since banished Keaton to another wing of the mansion, divorced her alcoholic husband. Keaton lost his wife, his home and his ...”