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“... the dog, and an empty spud bag to take up the shite’ remind us that we are not in the world of John Banville. The odd reference to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the fact that there are immigrants around and a young woman, saying, ‘I was just like Oh my God,’ alert the reader with a mild shock that the novel is set in 2006, not 1906. As frequently in ...”

“... What could be more fitting than that his Notebooks should be edited by two fastidious scholars, John Gere, until lately the Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, and John Sparrow – Sparrow who at the age of 15 met Geoffrey Keynes on the steps of St Paul’s to inspect Donne’s effigy in his shroud and ...”

“... friend of Patrick’s, he talked mostly to him, but Princess Margaret didn’t confine herself to John Gielgud and Paul Eddington but to her credit wanted to meet the boys in the play, which she did, though I suspect most of them had no idea who she was. In 1984 Snowdon took pictures of me for (I think) the Sunday Times after the shooting of A Private ...”

“... o’clock in the morning. They’re wrong. I nearly died in an experimental-plane accident with John Denver. People would talk and forget everything they said. Several writers blabbed away entire books in the corner of Blacks. Out of the blue, in the Union, somebody asked her bullying husband for a divorce. Hurrah! Up in the Academy, Auberon Waugh, happy in ...”

“... much further, but calling her ‘the best angry woman writer ever’ – the camp-trash director John Waters’s jokey blurb – carries much the same order of insight as Jacqueline Susann saying, post-Portnoy, that she’d like to meet Roth but wouldn’t want to shake his hand. Elena Greco, the heroine of Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, shares quite a ...”

“... quarters, and Maynard would be lost to them. ‘How we all used to underrate her,’ said Morgan Forster. Their correspondence between 1918 and 1925, when they married, has been edited by a niece and a nephew, Polly Hill and Richard Keynes, who rightly believe that it will be ‘of value and interest and will not offend their ghosts’. In an excellent ...”

“... book represents the ending of a grand tradition in the subject, for what he does is to combine Sir John Clapham’s concern with what was happening in the leading sectors of economic activity with the fairly recent techniques and insights of national accounting and demographic inquiry. Crouzet approaches the Victorian economy of Britain initially in ...”

“... frivolity and public school backbone, was educated at Haileybury and Cambridge. As the critic John Peter has put it, ‘parts of the Criterion resembled a supplement to the Tablet – while, incomprehensibly, other parts were crowded with Marxists and moderns.’ Read was an anarchist who accepted a knighthood, a champion of avant-garde art who also ...”

“... of his own disappearance into fiction. As he watches the rehearsals for I Am a Camera, the play John van Druten made from the Isherwood material, Isherwood thinks a good deal – sometimes comically, sometimes sentimentally – about the relation of art to life. In writing Goodbye to Berlin I destroyed a certain portion of my real past. I did this ...”

“... grandson Matthew Yorke, and rounded off with a touching if too brief memoir by Sebastian Yorke. John Updike contributes a gracefully enthusiastic introduction. For Green, writing fiction was so demanding – partly because he could only work at it in the evenings and at weekends, and partly because he rewrote so much – that it’s not surprising that he ...”

“... and journalist whose range extended from Good Housekeeping to an essay on the work of E.M. Forster, a book on Some Religious Elements in English Literature and a biography of Milton. Like her ancestor Thomas Babington Macaulay, whose History of England was intended to appeal to the common reader (and particularly to women), she disliked intellectual ...”

“... is only extreme consciousness: an enhanced receptivity to truth. It was around this point that John Clellon Holmes, a stay-at-home quester, purloined testimony from Kerouac and Ginsberg for a pelf-garnering pseudo-Beat romance (Go!), and, in a notorious article in the New York Times (‘This Is the Beat Generation’), took metonymic possession of ...”

“... is seen to be coming.’ He goes on, in a way that immediately brings to mind the opening scene in Forster’s The Longest Journey: ‘This is rather like the Berkeleian theory, that when a house is tumbling down, it doesn’t begin to make a noise till some one comes along the road, and only then if the some one is not deaf.’ Compare Rickie’s ...”

“... the work of Derek Walcott, who had once been a friend of his, and recited a whole poem, ‘As John to Patmos’, from memory. But later he rubbished him, and Walcott replied in the same vein, in several scathing poems, calling him ‘V.S. Nightfall’.I asked him to read an essay I was writing. ‘Are you sure you want me to read it?' he ...”

“... to know what to think (the pun on ‘solution’ is Berlin’s kind of joke). Committed to what John Gray has called ‘agonistic liberalism’, to the irresolvably competing claims made on and by post-Enlightenment individuals, Berlin was as keen on refuges from conflict as on conflict itself; more excited by academic appointments in Oxford than by nuclear ...”