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“... postwar period’, and adducing his love of American jazz and his hero-worship of Louis Armstrong. Black musicians, somewhat ironically, are the crucial link between Larkin and his mother in ‘Reference Back’, which beautifully describes the ‘unsatisfactory’ nature of his relationship with her (the word occurs four times), as well as the bond that ...”

“... for their gaunt and bitter aspect, maimed and bemedalled, roll out a banner, bordered in black crêpe, Thiepval 1916 it reads. So comfortably remote, remoter even than the ‘relief of Derry’ [in 1689] they are celebrating. Silently, humorously, doggedly, they mass around a dripping platform, a remarkable feudal, patriarchal, tribal, historical ...”

“... Johnson, who ran a series of newspaper ads that portrayed the tax as an attack on ‘the entire black community’: Unlike most white Americans, many African Americans who accumulated wealth did so facing race discrimination in education, employment, access to capital, and equal access to government resources. In many cases, race discrimination was ...”

“... was also a second song, a ghostly number about Saddleworth Moor and the murders of children by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, a song which seemed to bring place and personality together in a way that nobody had done in British pop before. Morrissey and Marr were a couple of arch-fans, a conglomeration of good influences and proper hungers, and their band, The ...”

“... he wanted someone to cook him his lunch.Over these years he met his literary heroes Hemingway, Ian Fleming and C.S. Forester, and tried, with the encouragement of Forester, to kick-start his own automatic grammatisator and sell stories to periodicals. In the short stories from the mid-1950s he got onto the marketable trick of embedding tropes from genre ...”

“... handicap of six makes him superior to other obsessive literary golfers such as P.G. Wodehouse and Ian Fleming, and only a little inferior to Malcolm Lowry and Patrick Hamilton, who were golfers as well as drinkers of championship class. This devotion to sport went with a declared aversion to women and, at this stage, to sex in any form. He told Carpenter in ...”

“... about kings and queens is as voracious as ever. In the past couple of decades authors such as Ian Mortimer and Alison Weir have been bashing out books at a furious pace, including The Perfect King (yes, it was Edward III) and Queens of the Age of Chivalry. In the last few years, publishers have jumped on the Game of Thrones bandwagon, peddling titles such ...”

“... saw around him capitalism’s monstrous waste of human potential. As Reid would put it, see the Ian Rankin living up that stair who will never write a novel, the Menuhin in the next tenement who will never hold a violin, the Chloe Kelly in that council block who will never hear the roar as she slams a ball into an open goal. For Reid, fairness would only ...”

“... they can’t get on with them. (I first came across this crack in a biography of the womanising Ian Fleming, who knew and cordially loathed Freud – who loathed him back.) François Mauriac, in his great novel of literary envy, Ce qui était perdu, puts it more subtly and tellingly: ‘The more women a man knows, the more rudimentary becomes the idea he ...”

“... remarkable. Ask who the leading young British novelists are and you may well be told Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, William Boyd, Julian Barnes. Given that writers typically have long careers and get better with age, ‘young’ is not entirely a misnomer applied here. Like politicians, novelists can be youthful long after the point at which the careers of athletes ...”

“... he was advised by his doctors to take a holiday. He reluctantly agreed, spending three weeks at Ian Fleming’s somewhat spartan Jamaican hideaway, even though British troops remained on the ground in Egypt. When he returned, it soon became clear that he could not continue in office (at the 18 December meeting of the 1922 Committee Eden was forced to admit ...”

“... Britain. Germinal was the great literary original, and the prophetic lines which close the book, a black avenging host preparing to stand up for their rights, the seed-corn of the future ‘slowly germinating in the furrows’, anticipates the epiphany of The Stars Look Down. Pabst’s Kameradschaft (1931), one of the first talkies, a narrative built around a ...”

“... with a stairway to heaven. The steps, coincidentally, chime in with a poem by the recently dead Ian Hamilton printed in the LRB. We are on a kind of stair. The world below Will never be regained; was never there Perhaps. And yet it seems We’ve climbed to where we are With diligence, as if told long ago How high the highest rung. 23 January. To ...”

“... the very landscape of Edinburgh. Male and fatherly is that authoritarian skyline, the horizon of black phallic spikes and spires stretching from Arthur’s Seat to the Highland Church and on to the Castle Rock. Motherly, rounded, green and tender are the great Pentland hills, Caerketton and Allermuir, watching over Gilmerton and Straiton and the city ...”

“... of the sonnets, Hardwick’s letters were in quotation marks: ‘I love you, Darling, there’s a black black void, as black as night without you. I long to see your face or hear your voice, and take your hand’ Or: ‘I got the letter this morning, the letter you wrote me Saturday. I thought my heart would break a ...”