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“... at least not to journalists – about his working life prior to his arrival at Dover College. When Paul Foot first disclosed Archer’s short-lived Police career (Daily Mirror, 30 October, 1986), the confirmation came from Archer’s lawyer rather than Archer himself. ‘His life story,’ wrote Foot, ‘shows that curious mixture of personal ambition and ...”

“... and Malraux would say no less to interviewers and critics, even in writing (notably to Edmund Wilson). In fact, Malraux may scarcely have set foot on the Chinese mainland when he wrote The Conquerors. Yet the book convinced no less a reader than Leon Trotsky that it was based on first-hand experience. It even convinced an old China hand like Jean ...”

“... Carlyle’s writings, with special attention paid to their political thought’, and Paul Johnson, whose high-pastiche polemic, Wake Up Britain! A Latter-Day Pamphlet (1994), was resolutely slept through. The Carlylean inflection can also be heard in the newspapers and magazines with which these writers are associated: the two Mails, the two ...”

“... of Westminster Abbey or There Will Be Blood? Even so, the author is not quite dead. It is true, as Paul Valéry pointed out, that many things are involved in the creation of a work of art besides an author; but this is to demote authors rather than to annihilate them. ‘What does it matter who is speaking?’ Michel Foucault famously scoffed. In real life, it ...”

“... it was, with America, uniquely among the combatants, still holding elections in wartime, Woodrow Wilson took the opportunity to ask the American people to express through the ballot box their views about the sort of peace they wanted. If they wanted his peace – the League of Nations and all the trimmings – they had to say so by voting for the Democrats ...”

“... compromised in any case by the absence of Bolshevik Russia from the settlement they imposed on it. Wilson, heading the strongest of the winning powers, may have had his flaws, like Tsar Alexander before him, but in Ghervas’s view is entitled to imaginative sympathy. He was no less moved than the tsar by high religious and moral ideals, which in his case ...”

“... his long and loving friendship with the self-thwarting Esther Murphy in The Fifties (1986), Edmund Wilson recalled how vividly, if also profligately, Murphy – whose particular tragedy was to have an alcohol-saturated writer’s block of mammoth proportions and lifelong duration – embodied ‘the special characteristics of our race of the 1920s: habit of ...”

“... more than her mother. She studied at the Slade under the all-powerful trinity of Frederick Brown, Wilson Steer and Tonks. It was 1910, and the students were advised not to attend Roger Fry’s Post-Expressionist exhibition. By 1914 Carrington, a mild bohemian, had cut her hair short, Mark Gertler and C.W. Nevinson were in love with her, and the world outside ...”

“... 19 entered Leeds University, where he encountered modern art in the form of pictures by Gauguin, Wilson Steer, Augustus John, William Nicholson, and woodcuts by Kandinsky, collected by the University’s Vice-Chancellor. Frank Rutter, curator of Leeds Art Gallery, completed the boy’s artistic education. He had already begun to write poems, in free verse ...”

“... way for his colleague at York, Dr Frederick Coggan. Dr Coggan’s appointment – made by Harold Wilson – has always been something of a puzzle. He was almost 65 when he got to Canterbury and never really recovered from his initial, ill-prepared decision (in which he was encouraged by some naive press proprietors) to launch a ‘moral ...”

“... or wasn’t only, a pulp craftsman embittered by the faint praise he’d been lobbed by Edmund Wilson before the likes of Eliot and Auden announced themselves as fans. Slick magazine writers were no good either – ‘their scenes are almost tiresomely neat … but they are little men who have forgotten how to pray’ – and when discussing the right way ...”

“... a kitchen porter masquerading as a dentist who lived off his partner’s earnings as a prostitute. Paul Buckwaldt adopted the alias ‘Sherlock Holmes’. And Karl Hentschel – ‘such a nuisance’ in Steinhauer’s view – repeatedly blackmailed the German Secret Service by threatening to reveal the identity of his own source to the British ...”

“... emigration to America, and his sense of himself as a writer. Not the kind, as he says of Angus Wilson, who ‘proudly calls your attention to every single God-damned nuance’, but a ‘“reassuring” type of writer’ who ‘takes you by the hand and leads you step by step from a familiar into an unfamiliar situation’. Isherwood knew from his own ...”

“... peace in the early hours of the morning while playing a drunken game of bicycle polo with Prince Paul of Yugoslavia. He insisted that behaving this way was his birthright and that he had merely been entertaining those he had woken up. What made all the difference was war and the Guards. All four joined up, keen to do their duty but also to see action; the ...”

“... allowed to say that we value A la Recherche for its life (the extremely hostile literary mandarin Paul Souday admitted that if one can bring oneself to plunge in ‘one does not let go’ because its ‘prolixity ... always conveys the feeling of life’) and for its humour, its marvellous and endlessly discriminatory sense of the ridiculous. But because it ...”