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“... sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolised by the very slow washing of dishes. Had John Updike been African, he would have won the Nobel Prize twenty years ago. I feel sure that his material hobbled him. Shillington, Pennsylvania simply did not measure up to his extravagant gifts. The absolute distinction made here between a writer and the ...”

“... the help he got from Gamlin. Forbes wrote to him at the BBC – at the time Forbes’s name was John Theobald Clarke – and Gamlin wrote back, telling Forbes that his letter was so extraordinary he would have to meet him. When they met Gamlin said it would be necessary for him to change his name. ‘Another young actor, ahead of me,’ Forbes wrote years ...”

“... provoking the staid and gentlemanly Yankees. George Washington, Abigail Adams and her son John Quincy Adams all praised him, with self-congratulation for American tolerance of his right to free speech. In England, the King spoke of him as ‘my friend, Cobbett’. When he was 37 – and had been out of the country for 15 years – the famous ...”

“... possession of a sailing boat built for him at Genoa. ‘It cost me 80l.,’ he wrote to his friend John Gisborne in June, ‘and reduced me to some difficulty in point of money. However, it is swift and beautiful, and appears quite a vessel. Williams is captain, and we drive along in this delightful bay in the evening wind … until earth appears another ...”

“... Middle-march. It is no use Gordon Haight’s denying that George Eliot meant to satirise Pattison: John Sparrow has pointed out that in that case it is odd that George Eliot, who was well acquainted with Pattison and his much younger wife, should have chosen to call the author of the Key to All Mythologies by the name of a 16th-century French scholar whose ...”

“... of his father, whose waiting-room was constantly crowded with supplicants for his services. As John Juxon suggests, the elder Lewis could have served as a model for the abrasive Mr Jaggers in Great Expectations, who suspended his moral judgment when dealing with his greasy, grimy riffraff of clients – cracksmen, fences, thieves – and then, in ...”

“... The first volume of John Lehmann’s autobiography, published in 1955, starts: When I try to remember where my education in poetry began, the first image that comes to mind is that of my father’s library at the old family home of Fieldhead on the Thames. It is an autumn or winter evening after tea, for James the butler has been in to draw the blinds and close the curtains, and my father is reading under a green-shaded lamp ...”

“... phenomenon is so striking that it has been exhaustively chronicled; and an inevitable drawback to John Lehmann’s survey of The English Poets of the First World War is that so many of his poets seem already chosen for him, so many of his conclusions already foregone. The excellence of the illustrations, the urbanity of the author’s prose, tempt one to ...”

“... nebulous enemy from the other side of the world. It could be Bob Dylan performing his ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues’ (‘I discovered there was red stripes on the American flag’); but the year is 2002, and the song is ‘Talkin’ Al Kida Blues’ (‘Cuba’s our enemy, unless we need a prison camp’). Al Kida is the name of a man who lives ...”

“... gallant men, and I thought them fools.’ What, I wonder, did these ‘fools’ think of John Milton as he watched and judged and yet abstained from their pleasures? Towards the end of his Latin poem on the death of his university friend Carlo Diodati, Milton expresses the fear that he might sound ‘turgidulus’. He then launches into a description ...”

“... On the Black Hill is about one of nature’s anomalies. Identical twins, Benjamin and Lewis Jones, spend their whole lives in the farmhouse on the Welsh border in which they were born in 1900. Apart from Benjamin’s military service in World War One – which he spends being treated sadistically in Hereford barracks – neither twin ever goes ...”

“... two poets, we are conscious of the thoughtfulness, vigour and expertise of the author. Mark Bence-Jones isn’t bothered by any ambiguity in the term ‘Ascendancy’: in his book, the Ascendancy consists of people of a certain social standing, living in Ireland but keeping to an English intonation, Protestant as a rule but not to a man, Unionist ...”

“... slow to learn the new language, were something for Sundays or, in 1793-94, for Décadis. Colin Jones shows how the noble intention of the revolutionaries to substitute a national policy of bienfaisance for the erratic charity of the Ancien Régime fell victim to the consequences of expropriating the Church and the insatiable demands of total war. This ...”

“... His mother, who wrote poetry, novels and children’s stories, was a sister-in-law of Burne-Jones and aunt of Rudyard Kipling. From Burne-Jones and William Morris, a family friend, her husband commissioned work; from Kipling her son derived a touch of literary inspiration and even an occasional helping hand with his ...”

“... a half since he was around – generations earlier than other rock’n’roll deaths like Brian Jones or Janis Joplin. Greil Marcus does not seem to have met Uncle Vester. Indeed, on page 71 of his new book he admits that he has never even been inside Graceland. (‘There is a good deal in this book I cannot explain,’ he wisely concedes.) But he has come ...”