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“... for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, the areas discussed in this, the latest stage in Leslie Bethell’s collective attempt to capture ‘Latin America’s unique historical experience’. God has not been kind to Latin America. Unlike their Northern neighbour, none of the Southern republics has ever enjoyed prolonged periods of peace, prosperity ...”

“... espionage worlds, and subsequently in business journalism. Unlike Fleming’s previous biographer John Pearson, Donald McCormick makes no attempt to psychologise his subject – or to reproduce the fluency which made Pearson’s book read as easily as a James Bond thriller. His justification is to produce, among much that is already familiar, some new ...”

“... about The Naked Lunch, a famous cult novel of the Beat generation. A not unsympathetic critic, Leslie Fiedler, found much of it ‘dull protest literature, manifestoes against cops and in favour of junkies and homosexuals’ – which is not sympathetic, but not right either. I can’t call to mind anything less ‘in favour of’ drugs or ...”

“... hated for his meticulous standards and his appalling sarcasms on the unscholarly, delivered the Leslie Stephen Lecture on ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’. In the course of it he quoted ‘O mistress mine, where are you roaming?’ and he quoted it as ‘where art thou roaming?’ He had omitted to verify his memory of something so well-known. He ...”

“... Price, Joseph Priestley, and perhaps Edmund Law, need no introduction. But William Worthington and John Gordon have not previously been placed in the august company of the Humes and Priestleys. Worthington figures briefly in the DNB and Williams’s Eminent Welshmen, but is not a household name even among historians of Georgian ideas. ...”

“... and had largely completed the first two sections of a novel. Her friend the essayist and novelist Leslie Jamison was asked to finish it, drawing on dictated notes, sketched scenes and indications from Godfrey as to where she had wanted the final section to lead: Peggy’s return to Paris in the late 1930s and her affair with the young Samuel Beckett. ‘It ...”

“... a year as Literary Editor for the Nation, doing so well at matching books and reviewers that John Crowe Ransom said he deserved a Pulitzer Prize for it. ‘Not since Poe had an American poet laid down the law in quite such a carnival spirit.’ In those days of talented amateurs the Eng Lit business was still the Gay Science. Used by Nietzsche, and as a ...”

“... amusement, prone to excursion trains, art museums, periodical literature and exciting novels.’ Leslie Stephen complained that high-pressure marketing and advertising had created artificial needs. They had filled art galleries with bored crowds, turned tourists into hacks and vacations into a treadmill. Flanders makes no use of responses such as these, and ...”

“... in the Eighties, culminating with a slaughter of innocent citizens. A police detective, John Richards, and an Attorney-General, Terry Gleason, collaborate to bring the gang to book. The criminals prove to be, not the usual run of bank robbers, but Sixties student radicals, now regrouped as ‘the Bolivian Contingent’. Their leader is a nasty ...”

“... with the arts. Elizabeth David, friend of Norman Douglas, is eternalised in the lovely icon of John Ward’s drawing, the epitome of chic in her companionable kitchen. M.F.K. Fisher is just as beautiful. Her most beloved husband was a painter, and her books are so instinct with upmarket bohemianism that it is no surprise to find her in a cameo role in the ...”

“... the historians (Kenyon among them) who believe in his greatness. Maitland’s relationship with Leslie Stephen and avid interest in Meredith’s novels would appear to be precisely the kind of detail Kenyon enjoys. Some room might have been found for Sir Henry Mame’s genius, even while debating whether he fits the category of historian. Much better use ...”

“... We can know Byron better than anyone has ever known him. Leslie Marchand’s edition of the Letters and Journals, which is far more extensive than any previous collection, has now covered Byron’s whole life. J.J. McGann’s complete edition of the poems is proceeding expeditiously: the three volumes to date include all the poems written before Byron left England in 1816, and Volume II has the whole of the masterpiece Childe Harold, including Cantos III and IV, which were written in exile in 1816 and 1818 ...”

“... the man’s men spectrum, to appreciative audiences. To say nothing of pretty-boys Cary Grant and Leslie Howard. Kanfer doesn’t by any means dismiss the argument, but he isn’t sure that loss of American virility due to an increase in women’s rights is a sufficient answer to the question of why there is no more Bogart. The full answer, he ...”

“... that the sketches had a ‘force of sensation’, but found the finished oils a ‘bore’. John Berger took the opposite view, that the completed works were rich in brilliant light effects, but the sketches were weakened by vague Romanticism. More recent left-wing critiques, especially since John Barrell’s The Dark ...”

“... editing a little dictionary,’ a friend explained to a clergyman foolhardy enough to ask whether Leslie ‘did any writing’. The enterprise in question was the DNB, one of those grandiosely-conceived and indefatigably-executed works of late 19th-century self-regard, comparable to the Victoria County Histories and the Survey of London. Year after year, at ...”