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“... and the great beauty of the ‘other book’ come partly from the dissonance of its elements. James Barrie noted in 1922 that ‘long after writing P. Pan its true meaning came back to me – desperate attempt to grow up but can’t.’ Le Grand Meaulnes is about adolescents who want to want not to grow up, but fail. Alain-Fournier, as has been pointed ...”

“... of the mill. It is the book which sowed the seed for John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, for Indiana Jones and James Bond, and though less slick than its successors, its anxieties and lunacies are more interesting. It isn’t suitable for children; perhaps not suitable at all.As a child Henry Rider Haggard was believed to be ...”

“... or another; and the fourth contains spirited appraisals of literary figures like George Moore and James Stephens. Poetry in the Wars is notable for its alertness and assiduity. Edna Longley is a formidable critic, and never better than when she’s proposing a revaluation of someone wrongly discounted, like Edward Thomas. The first two essays in this book ...”

“... and medicine murders in grisly detail but paid more attention to what it considered, like King James I, to be the real threat of witchcraft. Another anthropologist, Isak Niehaus, has since published a superb account of witch-hunts in the area, while taking a more sceptical view of witchcraft. Now Colin Murray, an anthropologist, and Peter Sanders, a ...”

“... suspicious of those of East European origin’ and, with reference to another enemy, James Goldsmith, ‘there was also the Jewish question ... The picture emerged: Old English county society versus parvenu Middle European Jews.’ The editor of the Sunday Express (says McKay) appealed to Ingrams not to attack his own proprietor: ‘Richard, I ...”

“... of his father’s work.’ Hermann Broch managed to leave Austria in 1938, with the assistance of James Joyce. Armand had less difficulty, for his Austrian passport described him as a Catholic nobleman whose main domicile was Athens: his fiancée, Eva Wassermann, had been a dancer at the Casino de Paris in Monte Carlo, and she was one of several Europeans ...”

“... Lying in bed with a cracked rib, I have been much consoled by these genial books about Wodehouse. The only dangerous one was Wodehouse on Wodehouse, since I was compelled to laugh aloud, boyishly, provoking the old knife-in-kidney sensation. Should any other member of the Ukridge idiot school chance upon this review, after being tipped off his bike by a London omnibus, let him heed this warning, as he lies in bed with his cracked specs and cracked rib ...”

“... was earlier posed, as she acknowledged, by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov and by William James in ‘The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life’. Ishiguro’s novels pose versions of it too, if not with such immediate horror.In Never Let Me Go, for instance, the child isn’t alone, and Kathy and her companions aren’t miserable. Their lives are ...”

“... newspaper column, that secular sermonette. A lament for the well-meaning replacement of the King James Bible by more narrowly relevant versions reads like a transplanted think-piece. A passage describing the technicalities of roofing (‘with slate roof tiles your pitch can be as shallow as 33 degrees – with stone tiles you must allow 45 degrees or even ...”

“... Midwich Cuckoos adaptation Village of the Damned; the BBC’s Dead of Night series and its M.R. James Christmas ghost stories; Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital. In a way, Young is writing a new history of British film and television, an alternative to the more respectable version that has tended to focus on Loach and Leigh, Powell ...”

“... of Merryland begins by announcing the first edition as a Bath publication, ‘printed for W. Jones, and sold by W. Lobb there, and by the booksellers of London and Westminster’. Other early editions name Jones and/or Lobb alongside the strategically vague London retailers, and there was also a piracy under the ...”

“... candidate, and he mobilised with almost unseemly haste to hold off the challenges of Brown and James Callaghan. For the next twenty months, Wilson was in his element: after de Gaulle vetoed Macmillan’s EEC application, Wilson greeted the Profumo affair and the accession of Alec Douglas-Home as though they were the unfolding of a strategic masterplan of ...”

“... playhouses were probably closed two-thirds of the time. Biographers, notably Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jonathan Bate, have struggled to determine the impact plague had on Shakespeare’s life and work. Did Shakespeare flee London during extended outbreaks, and so spend much of the first decade of the 17th century with his family in Stratford? Did he ...”

“... unsupported, cantilevered over empty space.This is not the long sentence as practised by James, Proust or Mann. Their sentences were magnificently terraced earthworks, but Melchor’s are more like slow-motion mudslides. There’s no question of any surprise, a sting in the tail, the equivalent of Columbo’s ‘One more thing …’ The refusal of ...”

“... included it on its list of Christmas picks. Other reviews deprecated the obvious influence of James and Wharton, among others. It would be easier to accept any or all of these assessments – Bevel’s outrage at a scurrilous portrait, praise for literary quality, reservations about originality – if the novel hadn’t supposedly been printed in full as ...”