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“... application, always tied, seldom happily, to a university department, and agonising over a book. John Updike, who had a modest two wives and wrote 63 books, was, in a way, worldlier and more comfortable, finding nests at the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books that he never left. These writers are dead now, and the only thing that can be said with ...”

“... on the night before. Elderly troubleshooters have tended to be just that in America – shooters. John Wayne in True Grit creaked in the saddle, aimed straight, and punched people in the usual places. He uttered platitudes, but at least they were home-grown platitudes. Why was it felt necessary to dress Mr Van Cleef in preposterous robes, issue him with a ...”

“... Sir Clough Williams-Ellis is best known nowadays as the owner-architect of Portmeirion, the hotel he built as a partly cliff-hanging, partly tree-nestled village on a North Wales coastal estuary, adding to it building by building across some fifty years. Always astonishing, some think beautiful, it enjoyed its greatest publicity as the setting for the cult TV series, The Prisoner ...”

“... mostly Scottish, and Hughes partly Welsh. The presidential or father figure of the group would be John Buchan, another Scot, whose innings was over before the younger ones started to play, although he was still around as they became famous. This English angle was partly suggested to me at the time when Hughes’s penultimate novel, intended as the first of a ...”

“... poem associated with Rochester, ‘Upon Nothing’. One is written in the hand of his steward, John Cary, the other in a scribal hand. The second has been meticulously corrected from the first by Lady Rochester, who does not however correct the ascription of three stanzas of the poem to ‘Dux Bucks’ and three more to ‘Fleetwood Shepherd’. Harold ...”

“... the ‘gravity’ of the offences. In August, the Labour Party’s spokesman on home affairs, John Fraser, wrote to the home secretary, Robert Carr, about the cases. The Sunday Times report on Fraser’s letter said that he had asked Carr ‘to pay special regard to the method of proof used by transport police’ and the lack of ‘independent ...”

“... the impact of Deconstruction in the United States. It does not engage in technical debate as John Ellis or Thomas Pavel have done, and is not an academic but a ‘journalistic’ book: journalistic in an honourable sense, which will doubtless not be immune from the sanctimonious sneers of the high priests of the de Man cult, who freely use ...”

“... buried sexual needs got on with men, and this biography provides a full account. Havelock Ellis first saw her in 1884, sitting ‘with hands spread on thighs, and above, the beautiful head with large dark eyes, at once so expressive and observant.’ First and Scott describe the strange relationship that developed between them with some initial ...”

“... with in less than a minute. I’d started to keep the list after reading a passage in Havelock Ellis’s autobiography. Ellis was a medical student in Westminster in the early 1880s, and remembered glimpsing ‘many notable personages’: I passed Gladstone walking along Whitehall, vigorous, alert, well-set, even in ...”

“... youngest contributors, such as James Campbell and Alan Hollinghurst, and the less youthful A.E. Ellis. Each here performs the same narrative trick, telling some resonant or portentous tale through more or less awkward or impercipient or blindly obsessive observers. In Hollinghurst’s ‘A Thieving Boy’ adoptive parents of a gifted, wayward child follow ...”

“... was summoned to Bow Street to show cause why it should not be destroyed in the public interest. John Hall (to give her the name she preferred) was not called upon to give evidence, and was silenced, when she tried to interrupt, by the magistrate. In this way the Beaverbrook press started The Well on its career as the best-known lesbian novel in the English ...”

“... too.The blankness has descended where you lieDeep in that building you already knew ...Or Steve Ellis:Hull was the global meridianall poetry was measured from;and now you’re gone, a flat blank gapempty as East Yorkshire, sits on the map ...The worst of these Larkin elegies have the authentic plangency of E.J. Thribb. The best, as yet uncollected, is by ...”

“... Hirsch’s book. Peter Jay even called it profound Academics picked at it and still do: Adrian Ellis and Krishan Kumar’s collection of papers from an Acton Society seminar is the latest instance. In fact, it was simple almost to the point of simple-mindedness. Hirsch started from the premise that our pleasure in consuming a good or a service is in ...”

“... Denis: ‘Marnie – wig, smell and all’; ‘Sam Smith, MP for Flint and religious bore’; ‘John Bulman, tutor, whisky lover and cheat’; ‘The misery of picnics’; ‘The Palship, dressed to kill ... ’ In triumphant contrast, there is: ‘Myself at 11, fisherman, child musicologist and budding atheist’. A Welsh Childhood is also strengthened by ...”

“... should do things much less ambiguously: their acts cannot be filtered through the head of John Dowell, the rich American simpleton (if indeed that is what he is) who tells the story. Moreover Dowell has to be there with the others, objectively represented as well as in voice-over; and it is beyond the power of any actor to play an impotent bonehead ...”