“... to be the best weapon with which to defend the cause of exclusive masculine rule rather eludes me. Perhaps he thought he could best keep the women under control that way; perhaps he hoped (as some of his female allies did) that the new organisation would combat ‘sex-antagonism’ by offering a model of harmonious cross-sex collaboration. If so, he was ...”

“... in mutton grease’. Few things give greater pause for thought to the amnesiac ex-commando in John Lodwick’s ambitiously daft Peal of Ordnance (1947) than the state of the box from which he rings the BBC to tell them he has planted a bomb in one of their studios. The booth smelt of urine and spittle gouts. He opened the directory; obsolete, tatty and ...”

“... English translations are also in print. The most commonly used is probably the 2004 version by John Fitch in the Loeb Classical Library. And another new translation is forthcoming from George Harrison. Each has different strengths. A lyric passage near the beginning of the play (21-25), in which Octavia laments her sad ...”

“... have descended on us. Their hoofbeats are still ringing in our ears.’ Three months later John Dos Passos reported in Life magazine that the Americans were ‘losing the victory in Europe’. Visiting Germany as an army journalist, he found that Europeans, ‘friend and foe alike, look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly they are ...”

“... a routine of ‘drinking all night, having an enormous meal at the Automat (which fascinated me) at 4 a.m., and then sleeping about five hours’. The Lodge, on 3rd Avenue between East 53rd and 54th Streets, opened in 1952. It took its cue from Shaw’s, also on 3rd, which according to one former patron, was ‘a narrow little bar that gave you the ...”

“... and vogueishness – have been dealt with explicitly by other writers: Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Agard, Grace Nichols and Tom Leonard, to name a few. For some, ‘literary art’ is a territory to be attained (Harrison’s ‘we’ll occupy/ your ...”

“... there are more than two hundred and ninety volumes of Francis Place papers in the British Museum. Mr Miles found working through them ‘arduous’ if ‘fascinating’. Because of their great bulk he took ten years to finish his biography (having, in a manner worthy of Place himself, worked simultaneously as a night security guard – even now his main ...”

“... 1 January, Yorkshire. Ill over Christmas I say to Ernest Coultherd, a farmer in the village, that my Christmas dinner consisted of a poached egg. ‘Oh. Credit crunch, was it?’ Two dead salmon in the beck just above Mafeking Bridge, both of them huge creatures, nearly two feet long, so big that one wonders how the beck at low water can accommodate them, though there are a few deepish pools ...”

“... there, and that no one was to interrupt them. He also claimed that he could see Hanover through Mr Herschel’s telescope and that it had been deluged by a flood like Noah’s. Later, he tried to climb the pagoda at Kew, and when he was stopped, lay on the ground and refused to budge, having to be carried home on his servants’ shoulders. A few days ...”

“... in The Practice of the Wild, a documentary film featuring her human companion and the writer Jim Harrison, recently shot at San Simeon, on Hearst property; a leisurely senior citizen conversation on wilderness, Native American myths, the Beat Generation, mortality and memory. ‘Nature is not a place to visit,’ the man says, ‘it is home.’ He is Gary ...”

“... early modern equivalent of the yellow highlighter. According to the Jacobean educational writer John Brinsley, ‘the choycest books of most great learned men, and the notablest students’ were marked through, ‘with little lines under or above’ or ‘by some prickes, or whatsoever letter or mark may best help to call the knowledge of the thing to ...”

“... well before Wright. Homosexual smears were directed against Edward Heath, Jeremy Thorpe, Norman St John Stevas and Humphrey Berkeley; bogus bank accounts (showing corrupt earnings) were contrived for Edward Short and Ian Paisley; Wilson was seen as the beneficiary of, and a possible participant in, the assassination of Hugh Gaitskell; lists were drawn up of ...”

“... volume contained work by eight poets: Robert Conquest, D.J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and John Wain, to which list Conquest’s volume added the name of Thom Gunn. Insofar as there has ever been agreement on the matter, the Movement has been taken to consist of ...”

“... The books listed below have been my leisure reading for many weeks, and I have a glimmering as to what it is that prompts the converted to claim so much for Gissing. But my own view, which is very commonplace, remains the same: New Grub Street is a novel of extraordinary power, and without it the oeuvre would be no more than the interesting record of a pained but minor artist ...”

“... I have just offered of the proverb itself must be just one more betrayal. Indeed, the case against me is strong. The Italian phrase gets much of its force from the jingling assonance of the two words, but one finds swiftly that it is no good trying to reproduce this with the weaker assonances available in English: ‘translator traitor’ and the like. Yet by ...”