“... Evans. Chatwin understood the aesthete; and even the humbler inhabitants of What am I doing here may be pinioned by a description of dress, from the Chinese who ‘wore a blue silk Nina Ricci tie, a gold wristwatch with a crocodile strap, and an immaculate worsted grey suit’ to the immortalised functionary in London’s Afghan Embassy who ‘had cut off ...”

“... was 41, he volunteered for the Army in 1915 and served in the trenches as an infantry officer. He may have fibbed about some of his war experiences but seems on the whole to have done well despite his unsoldierly sloppiness. As Alan Judd remarks, his war service deserved more praise than it got – another instance of his chronic bad luck. Allen Tate once ...”

“... hardly matters. The first version is to my mind the best, because the most ordinary. Since the man may survive or may not, which he does makes no difference to the story. (A modern narratology expert would shake his head at that.) The frostbite vs match sequence is more detailed and graphic in the first version, and two ...”

“... one both in Nato and the Community. If Michael Heseltine can stake out a distinctive position, he may even win some of the middle opinion that Mrs Thatcher never attracted and now positively repels. His European message is certainly attractive to those in all parties who voted for Britain’s entry to the Common Market eighteen years ago, and to their heirs ...”

“... theories about Australia. Some say that it is a form of cell-block Cockney, that the Kray brothers may even now be stammering their parole appeals in infant Oz. Others contend that it must be to do with the weather: that early Australians who settled some thousand miles from each other, with no contact, and from quite different racial stocks, all began ...”

“... of The Twenties and The Thirties – Wilson’s notebooks and diaries for those decades – may have done something to further this end. Wilson had done some of the preparation for their publication before his death in 1972. The Forties is wholly edited by Leon Edel, who says in his Preface that this decade, at any rate the first half of it, is pretty ...”

“... was not accepted at once. Dyson was now joining the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and Robert Oppenheimer, its director, at first refused to believe in the new theories, or in Dyson’s exposition. Oppenheimer usually had a very quick and deep perception, but when he did not accept an argument he could be very cutting in his comment and make it ...”

“... A chorus of woe prompted by the recession of 1980? No, all remarks made in 1948, and quoted by Robert Hewison in his forthcoming cultural history of the period, In Anger. Publishers are like farmers. When times are good – as they were spectacularly during the years after 1974 when the pound was weakest abroad – it’s difficult to get them to admit ...”

“... between ancient and modern in Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910) may owe something to the stinking Lanchester: or, rather, to the idée fixe of velocity it embodied. In October 1901, in a letter full of warm and discerning praise for Kim (1901), James had advised Kipling to ‘chuck public affairs, which are an ignoble ...”

“... want to grab, or climb on, that make you laugh out loud, that snag in the memory.)This stiffness may be a result of the curators’ desire to showcase her less well-known but more ambitious projects over the beloved Nanas, and to dispel the impression of an artist too upbeat, too accessible, too feminine to be taken seriously. But it was never sunniness or ...”

“... makes sense and can only be good. But for me the UK Border is a threat not a reassurance. Theresa May presumably felt a deep affinity with the Border Force when she was home secretary. She’s someone who likes things to be well defined. She has her red lines. She’s the exception to the adage ‘Nomen est omen’: she should have been called Theresa ...”

“... found.’ Saying what the truth of one’s life was, and curating the manner of its glorification, may well be the last big decisions in a life of indecision. When my father died, his dream of posterity blossomed, and the things he wanted to be true about himself suddenly found theatrical expression. He was never politically active, but the route to his ...”

“... writer has his shadows, and by middle age we know these counterlives are part of us. For some, it may be a dead father still stalking their prose. Forster spoke of his mother, standing in that house on the margins of Stevenage, surrounded by all her plates and her shawls, waiting for him. But the media age has brought those shades from places we haven’t ...”

“... a state of Woosterdom or Woolfness; at least in America people in novels still seem to work. This may have something to do with undergraduates reading Emerson and Thoreau, or it may have something to do with everyone needing health insurance. People who read novels in Britain and Ireland generally do so on holiday from ...”

“... a diary composed in imitation 18th-century English purportedly detailing Lovecraft’s affair with Robert Barlow, a horror fan, collector and briefly Lovecraft’s literary executor. In fact Lovecraft spent six weeks at the 15-year-old Barlow’s family home in Florida at Barlow’s invitation in 1933. It was an uncharacteristic journey for the reclusive and ...”