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“... me about Worship Street, where I lodged in the early days of Beyond the Fringe in 1961. It was a Philip Webb building (date: 1862) with a workshop on the ground floor and accommodation above, with the lease belonging to Henrietta Roberts (later Dombey), the daughter of Michael Roberts and Janet Adam Smith. What occasioned Rupert’s interest was his having ...”

“... title sounds like a novel, and the book can and should be read like one – a very remarkable one. Philip Larkin, who had the knack of making sideways critical comments as memorable as those in his verse, remarked that ‘the first thing a novelist must provide is a separate world,’ and it is true that the world Dr Green has made out of the relationship of ...”

“... palatable to the middle classes’. The novella’s effect was all the stronger for not being – Philip Kitcher misreads it – about ‘a closet homosexual’ who has ‘refused to acknowledge his sexual inclinations’. Unlike his fully self-aware creator, who, though never a practising homosexual (‘how can one sleep with men?’ he asked in a 1950 diary ...”

“... pool of local sympathisers for it to draw on as there is in Afghanistan. The restless valley of Philip Shishkin’s title is the Ferghana Valley, which connects eastern Uzbekistan and south-western Kyrgyzstan. There have been several episodes of public unrest in the valley, all brutally repressed, but they have had more to do with ethnic tensions and local ...”

“... Herzog, self-berating and uncomfortable with his reputation like the fictionalised versions of Philip Roth. Free of the priapic obsessions of Sabbath or Portnoy or the gynophobia of Bellow’s Sammler, Humboldt or Ravelstein, Seigl is wilfully solitary, stripped of ties: ‘A big ungainly man with a curious kind of grace’. At the beginning of the novel ...”

“... the adulation was encouraged in part by James himself. Fulke Greville, whose Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney paradoxically extolled the past queen, who had done so little for his hero, in order to highlight the shortcomings of the present king, was not the recipient of royal favour. But William Camden was; his famous Annales were written with royal ...”

“... is so violent and so scatological that it still raises hackles or causes embarrassment? Why did a French cardinal encourage him to write that book? And why did that French cardinal later marry and become an Anglican? One thing is certain: those men and women – and many small men and ...”

“... Europe. The developing policy of appeasement; the ‘non-intervention’ policy of the British and French governments with respect to the Franco rebellion in Spain; the helpless feeling that the humane liberal traditions in which so many of us had been brought up were dangerously threatened: all of this had us seriously worried. It led many to believe that the ...”

“... of Jewish mothering of an intensity rarely seen outside the early works of Woody Allen or Philip Roth. A la recherche has been characterised as a semi-autobiographical novel written by a Jewish homosexual, and narrated by a Gentile heterosexual with an inordinate interest in Jewishness and homosexuality. There is some truth in this, although Proust ...”

“... In Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), the five-year-old Infanta Margaret Theresa, daughter of Philip IV of Spain, has a precociously manipulated figure, her little torso moulded into a triangle above the ballooning shape of her tiered skirt. Promoters of female dress reform (‘healthful underdressing’) in the 19th century stressed the disastrous ...”

“... of the time. The Parallèle des trois premiers rois Bourbons remains a work every historian of the French 17th century needs to read, and not just because it contains a series of brilliantly apt vignettes backing up its arguments. Some of these came from the first duke, who was already 68 when his heir was born in 1675, yet lived on until 1693, a relic of the ...”

“... was quite keen on me.’ What on earth were they looking for – Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney and Charles Causley – that they should have rated Bosley’s heart-warming dexterity (feelingful as well as formal) below, for instance, 18 solid unpunctuated pages of pornographic daydream: Kenneth Bernard’s ‘The Baboon in the ...”

“... moustached forerunner of the rather dapper Hulot – is François, the postman in a small French village. He gets into all kinds of scrapes on the national holiday of the movie’s title, but the heart of the film is his virtuoso relation to his bike. Every bike gag you ever thought of is here, and quite a few more. François parks by a fence, and ...”

“... is more complex. Alexander came to the throne of Macedon in 336 bc, aged twenty, after his father, Philip II, was assassinated at the height of his power. In order to secure control of the empire, Alexander resorted to cruelty, levelling the rebellious city of Thebes in an act of exemplary punishment. His march into Asia – an unprovoked attack on the Persian ...”

“... in the New York Times, ‘Jewish writers – Bernard Malamud, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, inter alia – have emerged as a dominant movement in our literature. Herzog, in several senses, is the great pay-off book of that movement. It is a masterpiece, the first the movement has produced.’ Herzog not only had critics whirling their ...”