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“... is the literary equivalent of discovering that you have invited a kleptomaniac into your home. In fact the ‘lie’ about filmmaking in upstate New York is close to what really happened, though there wasn’t a collective, just Meadow inviting her old friend Carrie Wexler on a visit to see the footage of trains she had shot with equipment paid for ...”

“... and ‘Connie’ in his index.) In this way, Gray began slowly to build up a reputation in his home country, while the leaking of fragments of Lanark to literary magazines helped to spread rumours that something exceptional was taking shape. This sprawling, ambitious work began life as two separate novels, one autobiographical, one fantastic. At its heart ...”

“... the children that the literary ghosting began. She needed the money and it was a chance to work at home in Fife.Erdal wants her first book under her own name to be more than a witty account of a funny situation. The need for intellectual recognition shows in the alarming number of cultural name-checks which clutter her text. In no particular order, and often ...”

“... Clift to laconic statements of respect (‘He’ll do’) and friendship (‘I’m glad you came home cause ... well, I’m glad you came home’). In Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940), admirable comedies with Cary Grant (who graced five of his and four of Hitchcock’s most characteristic films), he added ...”

“... of self-importance. He was a deliberately hopeless soldier in the Pinewood Studios unit of the Home Guard, and, having volunteered to do a stint at a Naafi-style cafeteria, he would serve the food with one hand while reading the copy of Shakespeare’s plays he was holding in the other. But he was moved by the ‘red flame of love and comradeship’ he saw ...”

“... tanned Mr Lucky, a Beverly Hills rake, had once been Archie Leach, a pale kid from a cold, unhappy home in Bristol.That was the magical cut in his career. It isn’t simply that some of his films are among the best or most enduring ever made. They show the mysterious rendering of an admirable yet unreliable paragon, who seems to be watching us. His reticent ...”

“... never provided Christian socialism with mass appeal. The Guild of St Matthew, which was founded by Stewart Headlam in 1877, and by 1884, according to Bryant, was the first explicitly socialist organisation in Britain, had at most a membership of 360. Its stated aim was to fight secularist prejudice, to defend the Church of England and to promote ‘the study ...”

“... as the most stuffed-shirt, old school firm. ‘If putting a computer on every desktop and in every home didn’t make money,’ one character says, ‘we wouldn’t do it.’ Coupland is the sort of writer who is said to have his ‘finger on the pulse of popular culture’. Reading microserfs, one does not doubt this for a moment, but the suspicion develops ...”

“... was abandoned, its history constituted by rumour and myth. ‘Only those who are belated,’ Susan Stewart writes in The Ruins Lesson (2020), ‘can observe a ruined form.’ What seems like a dawn to us was belated to begin with. As Emily Wilson says in the introduction to her new translation of the Iliad, it ‘came at the end, not the beginning, of a long ...”

“... Hundreds, which isn’t rubbish but a well-plotted light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my voice had broken ...”

“... about the shelving of the Newsnight investigation into Savile. Girls from Duncroft children’s home had given evidence: some of them were 14 when Savile began coercing them into giving him blow-jobs. They felt it would be ‘an honour’ to be in the company of someone so famous. He promised them visits to the BBC studios and one of them says she saw Gary ...”

“... exciting. The annual fee for an arts student at University College Dublin was £100. Someone from home told me that he wandered into Theatre L one morning as Denis Donoghue was lecturing and noticed me staring at Donoghue with my mouth wide open, as though I was hearing an amazing piece of gossip for the first time. Donoghue was lecturing about the short poem ...”

“... artists shared the mass conversion of their race to FDR’s Democratic Party, which was also the home of working-class ethnics and those Jews who did not stand further to the left. Politics was not a subject about which people whose life was music thought very much. For black artists, the savage and pervasive racial discrimination was a deeply resented fact ...”

“... do his aesthete’s thing against nature. For Salisbury, there was Hatfield House. Hatfield was home, Hatfield was friendly chaos, Hatfield was where the private man was revealed. Hatfield was where the Hobbesian world, the world of warfare between the possessing and the non-possessing classes, ended. But Salisbury, a sensitive, nervous, scientifically ...”

“... rather unsavoury disciples – most prominently among them, the racist ‘philosopher’ Houston Stewart Chamberlain – and after that by Cosima’s English daughter-in-law, Winifred. Wagner proved for many Englishmen and women the perfect expression of the night-side of European life: the first of these strange disciples, Jessie Laussot, makes her ...”