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“... cylinders of rolled lawn         harnessed to his flatbed.         I took them for lumber         till I saw him truck them through the car-wash         which procedure         so he told me         he repeated every hundred miles.         These were destined for a county ...”

“... melodramatic; they were, I think, a good deal wiser’ than the current crusaders for Spain. They took politics less seriously and ‘the dilettante tone has charm after the sweeping statements, the safe marble gestures, the self-importance – “I stand with the People and Government of Spain”’ – of Authors Take Sides. Apart from Robert Boyd, the ...”

“... and Myres, and Stenton) and Taylor’s. I doubt if the new one will fare any better. John Roberts, the general editor, does not show his hand in detail, and we must keep our fingers crossed about the whole being greater than the parts by giving ‘an account of the development of our country in time’ – ‘our country’ meaning something ...”

“... we’d lost you. No, I’m still here. Do you want to jump out a shy window? Little by little one took in the foxes’ keening: It’s all right, it’s sober, they chortled. This was just a plant, it counts only for the next time, and we in beach goggles, brilliant suspenders ... The party beast in me says let’s abandon, cooler heads say dive, dive like a ...”

“... Shortly before he died in 1922, John Butler Yeats wrote an angry, defensive letter to his eldest son William. W.B. Yeats had published a memoir in the Dial and his father objected to the almost parenthetical mention in one episode of an ‘enraged’ Yeats family. The remark unleashed in him a long-restrained irritation, prompting an impassioned defence of his daughters ...”

“... terse explanation. It appears that Lillian Hellman, Hammett’s closest friend from 1931 onwards, took steps soon after his death to acquire legal control of all the novelist’s copyrights (despite the terms of Hammett’s will), using as an argument her own intention to write a biography. Then, having succeeded in acquiring control, Miss Hellman decided not ...”

“... a name which he later changed for the same reasons that Marion Morrison became ‘Duke’ John Wayne and Izzy Demsky became Kirk Douglas. There was another motive. Grey’s birthplace was Zanesville in Ohio – a town founded by and named after his grandfather. Some of his early works, before he found a richer vein further west, piously celebrate the ...”

“... broken around it. Have a dish from the legacy. You’re going to be good with that. Ever since he took those vitamins a gag order without any support for these made five in the back seat. They say it’s infectious – work stoppage, invisible mending afoot that is a circa gritty one backing through town, allowed to have lunch if they don’t want ...”

“... John Taylor, the journalist, newspaper editor and poet, was born in 1757. His grandfather, the legendary ‘Chevalier’ Taylor, had been oculist to George II, and afterwards, so his grandson assures us, to ‘every crowned head in Europe’. He was as famous for his womanising as for his knowledge of ophthalmology, but most famous, perhaps, for his habit of prefacing every operation he performed with a long speech in praise of his own skill, composed in what he claimed was ‘the true Ciceronian’, with each main verb cunningly held back to the end of the sentence ...”

“... of commas into such sentences as he thought showed a need of them. This was Jérôme Lindon, who took over the firm in 1948 and ran it for 53 years up until his death in April last year. It had begun during the Occupation, with the midnight of the name serving as a clue to its having come into being under a German curfew. Its first book, written by one of ...”

“... as ‘Miss Mistress’.) ‘Some friends say that Dorothy ... was in love with Chester and only took his father as second-best. She has been described as tall, slim and ethereal, floating along with a scarf trailing, à la Isadora. They say she was especially ethereal when drunk. When she stopped drinking she became even more ethereal and somewhat ...”

“... detail and come up with a host of fresh examples and insights. His book makes a good complement to John Barnard’s more general but also innovative study in the new Cambridge introductions to ‘British and Irish Authors’, a high-quality series which includes Patrick Parrinder on James Joyce and John Batchelor on ...”

“... to a child, and so in a different way was the prestigious Perse school at Cambridge, which took women’s education seriously. After that it was a relief to go on the town in some degree, settling into night-clubs and taking up with rackety gentlemen who nonetheless behaved and dressed well, seeming to offer a degree of stability along with freedom. In ...”

“... but to have a ‘friend’ – no, it really won’t do. ‘I’m your friend,’ said Myfanwy to John as they crouched in the ‘dark and furry cupboard while the rest played hide-and-seek’. Betjeman got that about right.‘We’ve always been the greatest friends’ – that is the kind of thing the lady says about her dentist or accountant, or a woman ...”

“... the lover (who has, significantly, no credit on the title page). Spencer’s letters to and from John Tasker, an Australian with whom he was involved between 1957 and 1959, when they were both in their mid-twenties, are not, as love letters go, especially interesting. There are routine endearments, doubts, quarrels, expressions of physical desire and gossip ...”