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“... Sherwood Anderson (64), George Santayana (61), Henry Miller (56), Emerson (55), William James (49), Nietzsche (46) and Anaïs Nin (40). These are only the familiar names; the unknown table-talkers, maxim-mongers and cracker-barrel wiseacres buttonhole the reader hardly less repetitively. Among the prolific pronouncements on human nature and the ...”

“... Wollheim, and no fewer than 13 of Spender’s own poems, read by Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, James Fenton, Jill Balcon and Barry Humphries. (At Larkin’s, there were three.) Spender’s order of service, despite his obvious absence, seems to acknowledge both his customary admiration for the truly great and his anxiety about not being great himself. And ...”

“... go through these doors in a weekend, many may dimly remember that it was the owner of this club, James Palumbo, who gave a car, a Rover, to Peter Mandelson MP, to help the cause. It is here, at the suitably messianic Ministry of Sound, that the Use Your Vote campaign is organised. Much of the music inside will come from Creation Records, the label which ...”

“... browbeating a smarmy male editor during the Ladies’ Home Journal sit-in of 1970. And Germaine Greer, of course, a feather-cut hipster dryad: ‘It’s a cinch to have an orgasm. I can give an orgasm to my cat!’ And ever since, this book-as-bomb model has come to stand for the progress of feminism in general: Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth, 1990), Susan ...”

“... veteran and amnesiac, who meets and eventually marries a dance-hall singer called Paula, played by Greer Garson; he becomes ‘Smithy’ and lives with her in Devon. Some years later, during a visit to Liverpool, he slips and falls. When he regains consciousness he remembers he is Charles Rainier but has forgotten that he is Smithy: ‘Amnesia squared’, as ...”

“... and Ancestors (1982), The Politics of Evolution (1989) and, most successfully, Darwin (1991, with James Moore). Desmond’s literary technique has itself undergone evolution and, with his last two works, is now perfectly adapted to his purposes. Biography (currently the best-paid and best-selling of genres) is Desmond’s preferred form despite the fact that ...”

“... at Boston Garden in October 1940. ‘I knew we were going to war,’ he later admitted to his son James, but he had to delay till there was no way out of it. Willkie was furious: ‘That hypocritical son of a bitch,’ he said. ‘This is going to beat me.’ He was right; Roosevelt won his third term, as Wilson had won his second, by posing as the peace ...”

“... Of all the now vanished breed of New Yorker humorists – James Thurber, E.B. White, Dorothy Parker – S.J. Perelman wrote by far the richest, most meticulously crafted prose. His dedication to his art was almost frightening. He was once asked in an interview how many drafts each piece went through. ‘Thirty-seven,’ he replied ...”

“... out that Dorothy Richardson’s experiments with prose style had something in common with those of James Joyce; you don’t, however, catch anyone applauding Joyce for having written out of the abyss of masculine consciousness, though it might have been said of him with equal pertinence. Most of the studies under review here are concerned to see justice done ...”

“... He is 28 years old when he comes to London from the US (a little younger than his beloved Henry James) and meets the love of his life, a unique Greek called Nikos Stangos. The boys were fascinated by Bloomsbury – the books, the people, the scarves, the gossip – which led them to venerate Stephen Spender as one of its last links. Squeezed into a narrow ...”

“... into trouble with Norman Mailer by asking him, on an every-man-for-himself chat-show with Germaine Greer, about his fascination with the Hubert Selby side of life. Boxing gyms, jails, barracks, the occasions of sodomy. The practice of sodomy. He appeared riveted, in book after book, by its warped relation to the tough-guy ethos. Had this ever been a problem ...”

“... oddly-assorted, lively company of Primo Levi, Oliver Sacks, John Berger, Edward Said and Germaine Greer – but from a slippery starting-point: the journalist is a specialist in nothing. Sometimes he seems to know that only too well, and to underrate his own contribution. Calling for work on the growing power of an undemocratic state by an active, unashamed ...”

“... he has been employed to tutor. It’s Luc who finally initiates the sex, though Germaine Greer suggested at the time of the book’s publication that the heterosexual equivalent of such a scene, if publishable at all, would excite definite protest. It didn’t seem that gay fiction benefited from much of an amnesty after so many years of reflex ...”

“... gruelling routines had to be rolled around the palate and the tongue many a time before Clive James suddenly exclaimed: “A Shropshire Cunt by A.E. Sockprong”.’ I have a Y chromosome, so I can just about see that this is funny. But I can’t imagine that it was enough, as Hitchens suggests, ‘to make the long interludes of puerility ...”

“... was where his wife, children and extended family lived. In Shakespeare’s Wife (2007), Germaine Greer presented Shakespeare as a bolter who callously abandoned his family for several years, and she offers much the same view, if more mutedly, in her essay on his daughter Judith: ‘At some point in her childhood [he] went away and ended up in London. Somehow ...”