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“... less well than a lot of professional writers. The photo of a beaming 75-year-old Jenkins in black tie being awarded the Whitbread biography prize in 1995 for his Life of Gladstone suggests a life well-rounded in many senses. And yet, nagging questions about Jenkins’s politics and political leadership – and, indeed, about the shape of modern British ...”

“... David Bowie, who was raised, like the author, in Bromley. Similarly, Kureishi’s next novel The Black Album was named after a bootleg LP by Prince to whom the main character, Shahid, is devoted. Prince plunders freely from various musical genres, from rock or disco or funk or rap. To popular amusement he is forever adopting new personae: a satyr, an ...”

“... didn’t really know or even like but who just happened to be marooned in Oxford out of term.One black mark against Larkin is that he no more cares for the work of Flannery O’Connor than Amis did: ‘The day didn’t get off to a very good start by my reading some stories by “Flannery O’Connor” in the bath … horribly depressing American South ...”

“... during that episode of homicidal narcissism. He was also sure that the time was overdue to concede black Americans their natural rights as citizens, and used his coercive power on the Hill to this explicit end: the first time in history that such clout had ever been employed in that way. He threw away much of this gain by pursuing Kennedy’s fantasy of ...”

“... Eliot). As a reviewer and essayist, he gave respect and appreciation to such various talents as Ian Fleming and Dick Francis, Michael Innes and Gladys Mitchell – all British writers. It is hard to believe that he hadn’t read, at some time between its first British publication in 1943 and the writing of ‘High Windows’ in 1967, a book by the writer ...”

“... life. At the time of his death, Williams had published five novels (two volumes of People of the Black Mountains appeared posthumously). They have had their admirers, especially the first, Border Country, but on the whole they have seemed distinctly secondary to his theoretical and critical work, and many readers have returned a negative answer to the ...”

“... to fill in the spaces. The tone of it reminds me of the tone of Lowell’s conversation with Ian Hamilton from 1971, mechanically clever but distant and deaf, all denatured one-liners and musing rhetorical questions. It’s not conversation but the complacent burble of a radio on a windowsill. History is about as broad as Lowell gets, a custard-pie ...”

“... 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 from the Zappa papers in 1979: stapled small press format. It’s a breeze for Watson to present himself as a schizoid, high-Culture virtuoso who is dedicating years of his life (risking his equilibrium ...”

“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... lived in the quasi-monastic style of an academic gypsy, kept a room in his house painted entirely black, and for many years seems to have survived on a diet consisting mostly of blondies (a chocolateless variant on the brownie). Max’s fixation with ‘normality’ (‘Wallace’s childhood was happy and ordinary’) is part of a popularising mission. He ...”

“... the same autocrat, sipping standard glasses of tea, smoking the same cigarettes, lifting identical black telephones to say ‘Nyet!’ in the same dead tone. They too had transcended ethnic and familial differences in the universality of a great empire. But Homo Sovieticus was generally despised as a moronic automaton, while Homo Britannicus is remembered for ...”

“... his own retirement to cries of dismay all round, except from the ‘small young man called Ian Hislop’ who sat ‘tight-lipped’ as Waugh begged Ingrams to stay. After lunch Waugh walked round the corner to the offices of the Literary Review and took up his last job. The Literary Review began life forty years ago, along with the LRB and Quarto, with ...”

“... of the military recruiting centres in the Bay Area. Sympathisers of the not yet discredited Black Panther Party were in evidence, as were those who had been beaten and tear-gassed alongside César Chávez in his fight to unionise the near-serfs of the Salinas Valley agribusiness empire. All the strands of ‘the movement’ were still in some kind of ...”

“... telethon after Hurricane Katrina with his outburst about how ‘George Bush doesn’t care about black people’ – visited the White House to see his good friend Donald Trump. ‘You know, my dad and mom separated, so I didn’t have a lot of male energy in my home. And also, I’m married to a family that – you know, not a lot of male energy going ...”

“... can go back to women born over a hundred years ago. A late (and much missed) Stanford colleague, Ian Watt, once told me that as an undergraduate at Cambridge he was put in charge of escorting Gertrude Stein when she came to give a lecture in the 1930s. He took her to a tea shop for a snack and Virginia Woolf was sitting at the next table. (Neither great lady ...”