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“... into defensive ‘bastions’ in home waters under the ice. In The Silent Deep, Peter Hennessy and James Jinks recount the history of the Royal Navy Submarine Service since 1945. Naval history as such is a new departure for Hennessy, but in his extensive writings on politics and society, nuclear power and nuclear weapons, and intelligence and state ...”

“... literary genres, as a potted social history of Thatcherism is tucked inside some meta-textual high jinks. An anatomy of the appalling Winshaw family, Thatcherite predators of one ilk or another, provides the lens for a scabrous critique of Tory Britain; but at the source of the family’s history lies a mysterious murder, so that the text simultaneously yields ...”

“... see: how wrong or right was I? Do I know my friends as well as I think I do?’ The textual high jinks continue to the end. It is Victoria About, not Toby Litt, who is described on the jacket flap, in a fluffy biographical note: ‘Victoria . . . is the author of five fantastically entertaining bestselling novels . . . she lives in North London with ...”

“... Ring Road on page 27. Sansom acknowledges Eggers in his endnotes. But does it matter that the high jinks in Ring Road are old hat? Sansom thinks the question of small consequence. ‘Fashions come and go,’ he tells us, and if you keep his novel in a cupboard for long enough, ‘it’ll all be back in ...”

“... that night remains obscure. Traditional opinion divides between jinx and high-jinks, between an oligarchic conspiracy to scupper the fortunes of the democracy and a drunken prank at a spectacularly ill-judged moment in Athenian imperial history. In 1985, however, Eva Keuls published a book which opened up a new line of inquiry. The ...”

“... of the world: he wanted fame – and yet he did not want to be tainted with success. This is James King, who despite having already written the life of another mad poet, William Cowper, is ploddingly rational. The only occasion on which the two poets met was about twenty years after Cowper died, when he came to Blake in a dream. According to some ...”

“... a representative number of the magazine. Mount’s homage was accompanied by two tributes, from James Burnham and F.R. Buckley, to ‘our century’s most successful ruler’, Generalissimo Franco – ‘a giant who will be truly mourned by Spain’, giving ‘the lie to cant about “fascism” ’. At the start of the journal was an admiring interview ...”

“... proposition – ‘What about a baby then, old girl?’ – fitted in with the evening’s high jinks: ‘they had to round off their victory night celebrations somehow.’ But they don’t have a fairytale marriage – Ivy and Gerald argue about money, her drinking, his affairs – and Ivy tries to prolong an illusion of happiness through her daughter. So ...”

“... didn’t invite him to contribute to the anthologies, but not in the wider sense of, for instance, James Reeves’s Introduction to Georgian Poetry. He belongs to a vanished age of serious light verse. The 13 of his poems Harold Monro selected for his Chapbook for August 1922 (and which appeared in Humbert’s Kensinaton Gardens two years later) start with the ...”

“... Her slow decline and death occasion an awkward shift of tone, scattering the scholarly high jinks with a blast of righteous cosmic disgust: Every day the whole show starts rolling again, all totally without significance. There can be no true tragedy or true joy in a world that is so repetitive. We try to fill these credibility gaps with painting, bits ...”

“... Lewis Carroll seems an obvious precursor of James Joyce in the world of elaborate wordplay, and critics have long thought so. Harry Levin suggested in 1941 that Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty was ‘the official guide’ to the vocabulary of Finnegans Wake. Why wouldn’t he be? He was the inventor of the portmanteau word (‘You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word’), an inspired parodist of what Saussure later called the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign (that is, its being grounded in nothing but convention) and extremely proud of his ability to ‘explain all the poems that ever were invented – and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet ...”

“... stories, old chatty novels, stage farces – not everyone would connect Jean Cocteau with Sid James and Kenneth Connor. But it is above all a novel of the Thatcher years, satirically seen as the reign of a particular mentality, easily identified, but not so easily defined. Coe portrays it through six grotesques, members of a single family, which itself is ...”

“... edited by Mathews himself (who also funded it with a legacy from his grandfather), Ashbery, James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch. Like most avant-garde magazines, Locus Solus (named after Roussel’s second prose novel, published in 1914, and with an epigraph from his final long poem, from 1932, Nouvelles impressions d’Afrique), was founded primarily as a ...”

“... relation to no other subject has it dished out more abuse to moderate Tories. The paper’s high jinks over Brussels are shaped by a combination of anti-bureaucratic Poujadism and hysterical xenophobia. As they present it, the free British people have to fight off the interfering European superstate, and ‘the people’ is plastered across almost every ...”

“... one reason he slotted so well into its pages. His heroes were the great humourists of the 1940s, James Thurber and S.J. Perelman, and, like them, he often wrote of beleaguered men who struggle with a world that seems to be ...”