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“... as though they meant it, as though they meant it to matter ... Samuel Beckett (of course), John Berger, Christine Brooke-Rose, Brigid Brophy, Anthony Burgess, Alan Burns, Angela Carter, Eva Figes, Giles Gordon, Wilson Harris, Rayner Heppenstall, even hasty, muddled Robert Nye, Ann Quin, Penelope Shuttle, Alan Sillitoe (for his last book only. Raw ...”

“... eminence of the Times. The first woman doctor is kept company by the first woman barrister, Ivy Williams. The first private to win a field-marshal’s baton, Sir William Robertson, is missing. Billy Smart, the circus proprietor, is in, though not Sir Alan Cobham, whose private air force introduced millions to flying, or Sir Donald Wolfit. Tom Webster, the ...”

“... the entries in Who’s Who. There are some known names: Cecil Beaton, Jasper Johns, James Jones, John Mortimer, Patricia Neal, William Styron, Andy Warhol. Among the rest are antique dealers, decorators, magazine editors, a ‘freelance music co-ordinator for fashion shows’, a princess ‘internationally concerned with matters of spiritual evolution’, an ...”

“... of years earlier, Sticky My Fingers, Fleet My Feet, a short film I’d written with the director John Hancock about touch football in Central Park, had been nominated for an Oscar. (It played with Woody Allen’s Bananas at New York’s Baronet Theatre to brisk business.) In a giddy moment, we’d even taken out one of those bow-wow fuck-off ads in Variety ...”

“... dust along the ground into his mouth as he sang.’ Bowles was especially flattered by Tennessee Williams’s response to this macabre narrative. ‘Oh, I think it’s wonderful, Paul,’ Williams declared: ‘But you mustn’t publish that story. People will think you’re a monster.’ It is clear that Bowles felt such ...”

“... though, by the wit, honesty and variety with which Enright defines his compromised position. John Bayley makes an interesting comparison in his essay between Larkin’s paradoxical need to fuse in his poetry a recognisable speaking voice with an almost Yeatsian authority and intensity of statement, and Enright’s more leisurely, less aggressive ...”

“... erupts: ‘I won’t have you monopolising the agony market.’ Elsewhere, he cheers up Kenneth Williams, who is ‘low and depressed’, and criticises him on another occasion for possible tactlessness – talking too freely in front of his own mother. Williams is a good character witness: ‘What is heart? If we’re ...”

“... Home Office by the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship, chaired by the philosopher Bernard Williams, which advances a case for moral pluralism. The Labour-appointed committee found itself addressing a newly elected Conservative administration which dispatched its findings swiftly into the long grass.It is not obvious why Hilliard takes this as an ...”

“... one or two slip-ups en route. Bacon is made to sound too much like Descartes; the philosopher John Toland was not British; and Raymond Williams was not a Marxist. Neither was Althusser the cold-blooded adversary of experience painted here. It is true that he saw experience as the homeland of ideology; but ideology is by ...”

“... soul? A few white scholars thought the task impossible. Indeed, one of the most famous – John Burgess, founder of Columbia’s School of Political Science and of the Political Science Quarterly – opposed President McKinley’s imperial adventuring precisely because it threatened the democratic institutions he thought suited to ...”

“... A 1984 publication from Lawrence and Wishart, 1939: The Communist Party and the War, edited by John Attfield and Stephen Williams, complements and illuminates the new volume. This is the transcript of a conference held in 1979, in which several Communists of the 1939 generation explained what they thought was going on in ...”

“... commentary on Britain . . . And it shifted in tone; from the anxious to the apocalyptic. In John Fowles’s novel Daniel Martin, published in 1977, the expatriate narrator says of his homeland: ‘England is already a thing in a museum, a dying animal in a zoo.’ Beckett pulls many other examples (Lessing, Drabble, Spark) from what he calls the ...”

“... visit him: Wystan Auden and Chester Kallman, Graham Greene, Allen Tate, Louis MacNeiec, Tennessee Williams, Noel Coward, John Braine, Mary McCarthy ... (a shade slyly, Mrs Spark, after all a director in her own way, may here be self-indulgently thinking of some of her own old pals). He meditates the great turn of the times ...”

“... Bronx. O’Brien is one of a long line of hicks from upstate who made their way to the big city. John Ashbery, whose work O’Brien disapproved of (‘the poetry of programmatic inconsequence’), had arrived in NYC 15 years earlier, from a farm near Lake Ontario. Many of O’Brien’s poems could be characterised as pastoral. This is ‘East Branch’: a ...”

“... way to moralising repulsion and evangelical enthusiasm. The Victorian Sanskritist Monier Monier-Williams described Tantra as Hinduism’s ‘last and worst stage of medieval development’. The instinct to treat it as a kind of degeneration, a ‘lamented supplement’ to pristine orthodoxy, as one scholar of Buddhism has put it, is still common. Reading ...”