“... amphetamine gunslingers proved their manhood: Jim Thompson, Harry Dean Stanton and Robin Cook (a.k.a. Derek Raymond). Penman was the writer who isn’t in the book, talking to people who are, or were, or ought to be. His patch was cinema arcana, curating the ‘sessions men’ as he calls them, jobbing actors with faces full of motel moonlight. Professionals ...”

“... forward to writing as my chief work’. Collingwood left his literary estate in the hands of Malcolm Knox, a Tory Hegelian from St Andrews, who disliked the manuscript on history and thought the notion of publishing it must have been conceived ‘when R.G.C. was unusually ill’. Indeed, Knox disapproved of the later work in its entirety: he thought ...”

“... were preoccupied with the US, alert to Vietnam and the growing anti-war movement. Others invoked William Blake and Rimbaud (‘the disordering of all the senses’), Allen Ginsberg and the scary William Burroughs. All exchanged their expertise freely as they strode the fields of cool together; they were mostly kind to ...”

“... response to his more portentous gestures, a version of the self-protective rhetorical device that William Empson diagnosed as ‘pseudo-parody to disarm criticism’. ‘I don’t think I am less happy than most. But the word Happy has ceased for years to mean anything I seek to be. How’s that for a pompous mouthful?’ Heartless about his own ...”

“... among others, by Sayre’s father, whose credits include Annie Oakley, Gunga Din and, with William Faulkner and Nunnally Johnson, The Road to Glory) merely intensified an already entrenched aversion to collaboration, censorship, interference. Only Johnson, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, among the New York circle, flourished as ...”

“... Yet he was also the natural outsider in a scene that as well as Britten (born 1913), included William Walton (1902) and Lennox Berkeley (1903), with the reassuring presence of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872) hovering over them all. Whether Tippett ever entered the pantheon, or even deserves to, remains an open question for some. His Concerto for Double ...”

“... established at once the distinctive atmosphere of Waugh’s 1930s books: ‘the world’, as Malcolm Bradbury summarised it, ‘of comic absurdity and anarchy, in all its animalism and madness’. But only shortly before the novel appeared Waugh had published a life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti that inhabited a different world altogether. The book conveys ...”

“... throne, and suspected younger black writers of patronising him. In his 1963 novel, The Stone Face, William Gardner Smith, one of the Tournon soul brothers, pictured a writer like Himes emerging ‘from his apartment now and then to drink heavily and launch an ironic tirade against the United States and the white world in general’. The only black intellectual ...”

“... tragedy, a squandered opportunity, a failure. ‘What was it he had missed?’ Kazin asks of William Dean Howells, whose modest novels fought the battle for realism as best they could. ‘Howells had missed something, and he knew it as well as the generations after him were to know it . . . He had spoken in all the accents of greatness without ever ...”

“... Ruby Sparkes, Eddie Chapman, Tommy Smithson – were in attendance; along with Lady Docker and ‘William Hickey’. Literary life has made few advances from that day in 1955. Gennaro’s being the aboriginal aka of the Groucho Club.) With the passage of time images from the Kray scrapbooks, once seen as the harmlessly boastful trophies of a pair of Proustian ...”

“... celebrate texts not as embodiments of moral truths but as perpetual, festive comedies of errors. Malcolm Evans’s essay on ‘Deconstructing Shakespeare’s Comedies’, which is itself highly ludic, shows how the ideas of Derrida and Bakhtin can be applied to the polysemous discourses of these ‘carnivalesque’ plays. But he is uneasily aware that ...”

“... jazz photographs and religious texts, and the memorabilia of black figures from Joe Louis to Malcolm X. There was an autograph letter from Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who published his autobiography in 1845 and became a leading Abolitionist. There were documents that shed light on the intimate workings of the ‘peculiar institution’ which so ...”

“... James was eleven, Stirling Castle was raided by Catholic rebels. At sixteen, he was kidnapped by William Ruthven, earl of Gowrie, and imprisoned for ten months. This plot, known as the Ruthven Raid, sought to remove James from the influence of his first favourite, his French and Catholic cousin, Esmé Stuart. After the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, James addressed ...”

“... and SDP founder Roy Jenkins or the Americans Telford Taylor (later a Nuremberg prosecutor) and William Bundy (a Kennedy security adviser). Never a communist, he felt emotional solidarity with the Soviet Union as an ally and was indignant if anybody criticised Soviet actions (‘Oh, the Poles!’). Sisman doesn’t ask the question, but it would be ...”

“... With Making It, Podhoretz was stepping up into Mailer’s heavyweight division, only to get KO’d by the champ himself – sucker-punched. Mailer read the book in galley and told Podhoretz he liked it. It was Podhoretz’s hope after the volley of abuse from nearly every quarter that Mailer would ride to the cavalry rescue. But when Mailer’s essay on ...”