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“... have been concerted, populist and unfair. They have been led by the Home Secretary, Michael Howard (a frequent and bad loser in the courts), and the Chairman of his Party, Brian Mawhinney, who has urged Tory hangers and floggers to write in and complain about lenient sentencing on the part of judges, and has put out as party propaganda a non-existent ...”

“... lady’s education as justifying their own efforts to study and produce literary works. Henry Howard, later Earl of Northampton, studied the text closely, attending to Castiglione’s discussions of the arts as well as to his definition of the artless art of conversation. Others understood it more pragmatically. Gabriel Harvey, an ambitious Elizabethan ...”

“... and therefore suffering from the same nostalgia syndrome). In a review (in the New Republic) of Anthony Lane’s book Nobody’s Perfect, Thomson, aged sixtyish, compares a non-exhaustive list of the movies available for Pauline Kael to review in the 1970s with those reviewed in the New Yorker by Lane, aged between 30 and 40. Here’s his 1970s list: Bonnie ...”

“... car: ‘There are plenty of motels in this area. You should’ve – I mean just to be safe – Anthony Perkins, who plays Norman Bates in the film, has justly remarked: ‘Luckily, I think that most of the people who saw the picture enjoyed it in a very good warmhearted way. When they were frightened, they were pleased that they were frightened.’ For ...”

“... British publishers of the 20th century, Maschler is English but not quite English enough. Like Anthony Blond, the publisher of Jean Genet and Harold Robbins, he is ‘A Jew Made in England’, as the title of Blond’s memoir had it. The outline of Maschler’s career also recalls that of John Calder, whose memoir, Pursuit, was published in 2001, to ...”

“... repented either of these activities. Still, he too was a bookman. In a tiny herbal that Charles Howard inscribed to John Winthrop Jr, Wait added a note recalling that the gift had been given in London in or around 1662, enhancing its associations.Gigante has discovered as many fans of Lamb among Boston antiquarians as there were in New York. Bostonians ...”

“... 1st, Catherine of Aragon; 2nd, Anne Boleyn; 3rd, Jane Seymour; 4th, Anne of Cleves; 5th, Catherine Howard; 6th, Catherine Parr etc). The authors have made their own compromise, which, as the price of retaining connected prose, offers a highly selective summary of salient events. It is instructive to observe how precious space has been allocated. The monarchs ...”

“... on the door, discovering his great-great-great-great-uncle to be the ‘father of Tasmania’, Anthony Fenn Kemp. In 1793, the 20-year-old Kemp, having worked his way through a hefty inheritance, set sail for Australia, where thanks to family connections and thuggish self-interest he eventually reinvented himself as a Tasmanian aristocrat. The first ...”

“... The most interesting book of first poems in many years’, Richard Howard proclaimed in 1981. James Merrill, John Hollander and John Ashbery spoke in similarly emphatic terms, while Anthony Hecht saluted an ‘extraordinarily fine’ debut and Harold Bloom hailed the arrival of a great original ...”

“... the reality was another matter. He knew that his real home had been the condemned playground. Anthony Powell comments on the odd fact that Connolly’s chosen and not uncherished home in later years was not some castle in Spain or a Dordogne farmhouse but a bald redbrick villa in an Eastbourne street, well away from the sea but not so far from his ...”

“... stuff preserved by ambiguous clauses in his will, stuff let loose on the nation first in 1988 via Anthony Thwaite’s edition of the poems and then in Thwaite’s Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (1992) and Andrew Motion’s Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (1993). In Larkin’s best poems ‘minginess of spirit’ – J.M. Coetzee’s phrase from another ...”

“... before Lucky Jim appeared. It had no great success, and Larkin cannot have been best pleased (as Anthony Powell would say) by the runaway sales of Lucky Jim – indeed his letters show that he wasn’t. Powell, an expert judge of fictional techniques, was greatly impressed by Jim, and in his recent journals points out some usually overlooked features. Why ...”

“... to stem from a fierce and prior quarrel. Welchman cross-examines Morris Louis and Frank Stella and Anthony Caro as namers, and catches too much noise in them, as if he’d cracked the secret of Modernism’s purity – that it was really contaminated by a literariness it sought to disavow. He tells us that ‘the titling practices of the Sixties ...”

“... there, such as the late Rudolf Wittkower (author of the excellent monograph on the sculpture), Howard Hibbard (author of the admirable Penguin introduction to Bernini’s work in all media) and Irving Lavin, who has so exhaustively investigated Bernini’s work at the crossing of St Peter’s, and who now, in these two handsome volumes, turns his attention ...”

“... to read the letters (or many of them) that Amis received: several hundred from Robert Conquest, Anthony Powell, John Betjeman, Philip Larkin and others. These letters help supply the answers to niggling editorial puzzles: for example, the identity of ‘Bluebell’ (Conquest’s dog), or ‘engine driver Hunt’, from a passage in a letter reading ...”