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“... Arnold Schoenberg, Lionel Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel and Bertolt Brecht rubbed shoulders with Peter Lorre, Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx and many others. Brecht and Christopher Isherwood had briefly lived and worked in the cottage where I was pounding out the first draft of an adaptation in ...”

“... investment. The Modernist will to literature found its most vivid polemical expression in Wyndham Lewis’s Blast, organ of the Great London Vortex, which managed two violently iconoclastic issues, in June 1914 and July 1915, before collapsing. Kenner devotes some apocalyptic pages to Blast, in which the journal causes immediate and widespread offence, costs ...”

“... he is attempting to heal old wounds and soften his ‘stern age’ into peace. Similarly, C. Day Lewis’s translation of the Aeneid (1952) might be regarded as a shrewd strategy by an establishment operator who hoped one day to succeed Masefield as Poet Laureate. More charitably, it could be argued that Day Lewis’s ...”

“... and his father, whose hair ‘stuck up at the back, just as Harry’s did’). And where both Peter Pan and Mary Poppins taught children to fly or float by thinking happy thoughts, Rowling takes the concept into a more sinister area. Harry learns that the only way to defend himself against the Dementors, who will destroy him by assuming the form of what ...”

“... lookout for the Evil One, who roams around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour (1 Peter 5.8). We were looking for ‘decisions’ for Christ, or rededications at the very least. We preached the good news. We believed that Jesus meant it when he said I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one goes to the Father except by me (John 14.6). We ...”

“... he had discarded in conversation – and some of the unwisdom, too.In The Hunting of the Snark, Lewis Carroll, a Christ Church don, wrote: ‘What I tell you three times is true.’ With Auden, also at Christ Church, it was the opposite. What Auden said three times you would begin to doubt and when he’d said it a dozen times nobody cared anyway. Auden ...”

“... come they are almost immortal?’, or to use Martianus Capella’s term, borrowed by C.S. Lewis, longaevi. Perhaps they weren’t human after all. Once again there was a hardline view: they were spirits, and since they weren’t angels they must be devils, which meant that those who believed in elf queens dancing in green meadows – in the words of a ...”

“... account of muscular and gestural movement, frame by frame, as we find it in Wyndham Lewis, early Peter Weiss, the Beckett of Watt (the turn of the century Germans even had a word for it: Sekundenstil)? But it is not analytic; it does not break conventional gestures, conventional acts and names (‘I took a ...”

“... state’ is the most impressive analysis of the way 18th-century Britain actually worked since Lewis Namier anatomised its parliamentary and electoral system in The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III sixty years ago. Brewer’s main target is the notion that because domestic government was sometimes more amateur and decentralised in much ...”

“... in that very wide shady hat of his and dark dwelling eyes’. While the nonsense verse of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear or Stevie Smith is always immediately identifiable, de la Mare’s rhymes often seem both to aim at and to achieve the anonymity of a skipping song. The opening rhyme of Peacock Pie is a good example:I heard a horseman      Ride ...”

“... time at the Trafalgar Studios. I saw the first production at Wyndham’s in 1964 with Madge Ryan, Peter Vaughan and Dudley Sutton. Good in the part Sutton was already too old, as have been most of the actors who’ve played in it since. It’s a play I would dearly like to have written, though these days for it to retain its shock value the young man should ...”

“... back. He is one of the last relics of madder, more eclectic days. The poet and environmentalist Lewis MacAdams claims that ‘in a Greek restaurant one night I saw him talk his way through an entire dinner, from the spanakopita to the baklava, without taking a bite.’ That struck a chord with me because some way into the first two parts of his projected ...”

“... was gathering momentum in Orkney, Greenvoe has a remarkable coherence – but the prose of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s ecologically resonant Sunset Song sounds surer and is more daring. The coherence and harmony of Brown’s finest work don’t prove that Shangri-la is to be found in Stromness, or even in the depopulated valley of Rackwick on Hoy, which ...”

“... provided the helicopters and a week or two of basic training for the cast.Thomson reckons it was Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) that first established the grammar of the ‘good battle scene’: high-angle points of view, a ‘tracking motion’ to ‘animate or excite’ the progress of an attack, an editorial ‘cut and ...”

“... the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ‘Quite the best revue I’ve seen for some time. Bernard Levin’, the point being that whatever the notices this could go up at the front of house.27 January. A woman writes to me saying that having read a piece I’d ...”