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“... first chance in that pub. A few of the celebrants are, or have been, English dons – John Fuller, Simon Gray, Dan Jacobson; but even they arrived by what might be called the bohemian route. There are of course other ways in; anybody can see how much space the dons occupy in the respectable papers and magazines. Many moved in by routes that did not necessarily ...”

“... enough not to encourage laziness or dilettantism . . . say £150 to £300 a year’. And Simon Armitage, in 1998, seems to agree that now and then a bit of poverty can keep a writer on his toes. ‘At some points in my life it’s suited me to be skint,’ he says. ‘Poetry is connected with the root conditions of being alive, and one aspect of that ...”

“... first one, then the other, became party leader. Simply through losing his seat in 1931 Herbert Morrison slipped out of the running. The post-war Attlee Government missed a golden opportunity to restructure British society: nothing is more certain than that Morrison would have done no better. So the wearisome catalogue ...”

“... hostility of rate-payers and fell in 1907 to the Conservatives, who ran the Council until Herbert Morrison mobilised his London Labour caucus in the 1930s. Gradually, however, the depopulation of London and growth of suburbs in Kent, Middlesex, Surrey and Essex fatally undermined the LCC. By 1961, the population under its jurisdiction had fallen to its 1871 ...”

“... on Richard Shead’s excellent critical biography, currently unavailable, issued in 1973 by Simon Publications, London. Motion admits his debt in the Acknowledgements, but virtually nothing we are told hasn’t stemmed from Shead; the narrative sequence is reduplicated (Motion’s account of Constant’s first marriage, for instance, follows Shead’s ...”

“... and worthy, or would-be worthy, have queued up to appear on it. On his death in 1965, Herbert Morrison, Clement Attlee’s heir presumptive for 25 years, was found to have a list of his eight favourite songs in his wallet in case he should ever be invited on – he never was. In his 1982 play, The Real Thing, Tom Stoppard described the eternal dilemma of ...”

“... early Sixties, while doing his national service in Puerto Rico. The manuscript was submitted to Simon and Schuster, where Robert Gottlieb, after dickering for two years, eventually turned it down in 1966. By 1969 Toole was an English instructor at Dominican University, working in his spare time on his PhD. A modest academic career seemed likely. But Toole ...”

“... In a recent radio programme, Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell, two of the most prominent of the New Generation poets, retraced the journey undertaken by Auden and MacNeice in Letters From Iceland – a sign of the renewed interest which younger poets are showing in the poetry of the Thirties. Although Yeats and Eliot were publishing some of their greatest poems during the Thirties, it was Auden who created the style which most of his contemporaries sought to imitate, and it is Auden, more than Yeats or Eliot, who is influencing younger poets today ...”

“... NHS always cry out against the past. They see only ugliness and failure, never success, and, like Simon Jenkins writing in the Guardian last month, they seem content to throw out the baby, the bathwater, the taps, along with the reservoir supplying the taps. Jenkins is right when he says there are too many back-office staff in the NHS, but this isn’t his ...”

“... way ... The hunter-gatherer is what humanity is.’ So far, so Fourier, or Rousseau or St-Simon. The most interesting question about state-of-nature utopian thinkers is where they insert the Fall and what they consider to have played the serpent. Ken Livingstone has no doubts. It was the introduction of agriculture, the Neolithic revolution ‘twenty ...”

“... are at a stage when a synthesis of influence and individuality is taking place. The poems of Blake Morrison are the most agile in this respect. He remains extremely private behind his deployment of several different modes; he is very controlled and his poems seem the artifice, knowingly intermeshed, of a considerable critical experience. In this sense he often ...”

“... portraits of those with whom his varied career brought him into contact. He is no Saint-Simon, even of the smallest size; he shows no sign of entering incisively into the motives of those he observes, any more than into his own. And since the ‘few bits of contemporary history’ he ‘knew at first hand’ are treated in so personal a vein, there ...”

“... O’Hanlon’s entreaties. In the end he is forced to make do with a photographer friend called Simon Stockton, whose only claim to literary eminence is to have been in the same class at school as Martin Amis. But here O’Hanlon sees his angle. Stockton runs a seedy casino in Kensington, and as a photographer specialises in the nude pin-up. His darkroom ...”

“... film (1969), Fiona Shaw in Deborah Warner’s production (2001), and among writers, Toni Morrison, who slants the myth through her novel Beloved (1987), as does Marina Carr more directly in her play By the Bog of Cats (1998), which is set in a traveller community in Ireland. Rachel Cusk’s take on Euripides’ Medea, commissioned for the Almeida by ...”

“... be surprised by the sequel. Presented with a sensational document and an urgent need for secrecy, Simon and Schuster posted a proof copy to Roudedge at the Independent on Sunday’s office in the House of Commons, which wouldn’t have mattered if Routledge hadn’t left the paper a year earlier to join the Mirror. The envelope was opened and its contents ...”