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“... The mood at Batts is one of desultoriness, torpor, ennui. Shortly before Edward’s arrival, Lewis Gibson, best man at Edward and Laurel’s wedding, observes Janet drift across the lawn, where her father lies fast asleep in a deckchair. Janet’s hand moves slowly across the back of the chair, without touching it. ...”

“... public. Aldington was a determined outsider, like Henry Williamson and like his friends, Wyndham Lewis and Roy Campbell. They were all writers who were never quite fashionable in their own lifetimes and not likely to be in the future. All of them held cantankerous, right-wing opinions. There were aspects of Fascism which Aldington admired and he was ...”

“... trim. The legs were grotesquely extended and put me in mind of a figure in a painting by Wyndham Lewis. I began to imagine that the archaeologist too had adjustable legs, concealed by his cargo pants: any moment he’d ratchet up to an enormous height, man and machine performing an outlandish ceremony to propitiate the dead. Someone suggested to the guide ...”

“... he praises Orwell, who appeals to his Plain Man side). In the Independent last year he patronised Jeremy Corbyn as a typical English puritan, in the usual lazy caricature of the sour-faced, high-minded left. He is easily irritated by talk of class conflict, and is not exactly in congratulatory mood when he calls John Carey the most class-conscious critic of ...”

“... but Drum had assembled some of the best writers in the country, among them Es’kia Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi and Bessie Head, as well as gifted photographers, and there was no shortage of energy.In the early 1950s the Drum crew had hung out in Sophiatown, a suburb north-west of Johannesburg inhabited mostly by low-income Black freeholders and their live-in ...”

“... class of used literature: with the attendant strangeness of honourable leftists peddling Wyndham Lewis and all the phallic stormutroopers of High Modernism. Such contrary behaviour is meat and drink to Watson’s poodle dialectics. After all, it was the not notably socialist Ackroyd who (along with Ian Patterson and Nick Totton) published the first bulletin ...”

“... He went down without a degree, failing to get on both with Anglo-Saxon and with his tutor C.S. Lewis, and understandably preferring to spend every afternoon at the cinema. After Oxford, Henry Yorke (to use his proper name) spent two years on the shop floor in the family engineering firm H. Pontifex and Sons. This led to the appearance of Living, his novel ...”

“... For some men, nothing else – human or otherwise – will mark their lives to such an extent. Jeremy Mynott’s Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience is an attempt to put birdwatching back into birding, to reconnect the obsession with rarity and listing to a world that thinks more humanly about birds.* Mynott is unquestionably a birder. He ...”

“... Colonne), Lydgate describes the Trojans’ elaborate embalming of their dead hero. Seated like Jeremy Bentham in the middle of a temple, Hector’s corpse preserves a simulacrum of life because of a special ‘liquor’ made to flow continually through his body, using a system of artificial channels extending from a hole in his head down to a pool at his ...”

“... The first was a Bible with a hard yellowish binding, ivory it was said, a baptism gift to ‘Jeremy’ and signed by the composer Haydn Wood – a friend of Colin’s parents, I suppose – who’d written the popular tune ‘Roses of Picardy’ in 1916. Above his signature, he’d copied out a few bars from the refrain, along with the words by Fred ...”

“... expressed in a variety of ways, continued to be made. In the 1930s the Caribbean economist Arthur Lewis argued that historic debt to the enslaved, accumulated over three centuries, should be acknowledged and settled to fund economic development. Such reparatory funding, however, was only minimally provided in the wake of the Moyne Commission of ...”

“... it adds little to the very good duo of earlier Dahlographies, the first unofficial one by Jeremy Treglown (who busted many of Dahl’s many self-mythologisations) and the huge ‘official’ one by Donald Sturrock, which, while seeking to bring out the best in Dahl, doesn’t conceal his self-aggrandising side.Through the mid-1960s Dahl wrote film ...”

“... adherents range from Edward Luttwak, writing powerfully in these pages on 7 April last year, to Jeremy Rifkin in The End of Work. From an abstract point of view – the vantage point of those who have high IQs and some idle time – Herrnstein and Murray have quite the neatest version of doom. People of high IQ have increasingly come to dominate the ...”

“... Macron), in the last two years we have witnessed the unforeseen rise of Bernie Sanders (75), Jeremy Corbyn (68) and Donald Trump (71), the oldest man ever to become president. These men have lurked on the margins of public life for decades, and a stockpile of images and stories has accumulated around them. Both Corbyn and Sanders have an impressive ...”

“... sections have something of the quality of a diary or a day-book: he takes note of public events (Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, the Brexit vote), responds to the books he’s reading and to what’s in the papers, as well as occasionally registering very beautifully the changing seasons in his garden and, somewhere in the background, the ...”