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“... on a trip to America in 1920, in the form of Robert McAlmon, a writer and friend of William Carlos Williams. McAlmon was also gay, and wanted to escape to Paris. Bryher suggested that they get married. ‘I put my problem before him … if we married, my family would leave me alone. I would give him part of my allowance, he would join me for occasional visits ...”

“... and was as grave and imposing a figure as his literary namesake. When James was succeeded by Bernard Ingham, who had worked for Barbara Castle, presentation certainly hotted up. Ingham gave a robust account of his new mistress’s views, stamped on the latest rumours with his trademark dismissal, ‘bunkum and balderdash’, and did not hesitate to pass ...”

“... as the book revealed, have somehow managed to move in to the chamber of their dreams. Professor Bernard Nevill, designer of many of Liberty’s most successful fabrics, is pictured among massive furnishings bought during the sad years when so many of London’s traditional Clubs fell under the auctioneer’s hammer. Gavin Stamp stands in waistcoat and ...”

“... say I can’t come but I look forward to being invited next year when doubtless the guest will be Bernard Manning. Giggleswick doesn’t have many distinguished old boys though one which it never seems to acknowledge was the critic James Agate. This reticence may be on account of Agate’s well-known propensity to drink his own piss. 13 June. Three police ...”

“... thing, since Kay was, according to Meyers, still sleeping with her husband, and had affairs with Bernard de Voto and with Lawrance Thompson as well. But Meyers, having secured the story for himself thanks to the co-operation of Morrison’s daughter Anne, has allowed it to skew his biography. Many of his pages read like newspaper précis of the plots of soap ...”

“... Coker’ and ‘The Dry Salvages’), W.H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Randall Jarrell, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop; fiction by Kafka (‘In the Penal Colony’), Jean Stafford and Saul Bellow; criticism by Wilson, Rahv, Trilling, Phillips, Kazin and McCarthy. As the group acknowledged, far from embracing radicalism, or even ...”

“... that the anti-totalitarian front fell apart. The first skirmish occurred in the early 1980s, when Bernard-Henri Lévy announced that there was a generic French ideology, stretching from left to right across the 20th century, saturating the nation with anti-semitism and cryptofascism. This was too much for Le Débat, which demolished Lévy’s blunders and ...”

“... the magazine. It was taken up in a TLS editorial; there was also a big Guardian piece about it, by Bernard Bergonzi. I’ve lots of cuttings; at that time I used to keep cuttings. In the next issue there was a long essay by Colin, ‘Dreams and Responsibilities’, about Al’s New Poetry anthology which was as near to a manifesto as the magazine ever had, and ...”

“... literary fiction; Parker excerpts a climactic scene in which the married but homosexual writer Bernard Sands is the excited witness to a young gay man’s arrest for importuning in Leicester Square – a moment almost too complex to be properly grasped in a short extract. There is also Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960), a marvellously ...”

“... that he must have been whistling. Martha, Lucy, Maureen, Josie … Margaret Martinson Roth née Williams made quite an impact. In The Facts, Roth comes close to saying that the idealistic values instilled in him by his parents delivered him up to Maggie’s manipulations; or rather, he does say so, but then (this being the structural trick of the book) he ...”

“... his mother, who was overcome by smoke on the landing. He went into the flat of Raymond ‘Moses’ Bernard, a kind, well-known old gentleman who lived on the 23rd floor with his dog, Marley. A great many of those who died ended up on this floor, Jessica included. Gary Maunders had also climbed the stairs to escape the smoke. ‘He used to try and scare us when ...”