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“... course. Ruth has Amis well sussed besides. ‘He wanted,’ she says, ‘to turn Larkin into a “love ’em and lose ’em type”,’ and for a moment we see these two leading lights of literature as what they once were, the Likely Lads, Larkin as Bob, Amis as Terry and Ruth at this juncture the terrible Thelma.Looking back on it now Ruth says: ‘I was his ...”

“... Michael Heseltine, and Mr Brown too. 20 January. Note how much pleasure I get from anemones. I love their Victorian colours, their green ruffs and how, furry as chestnuts, the blooms gradually open and in so doing turn and arrange themselves in the vase, still retaining their beauty even when almost dead, at every stage of their life delightful. I used to ...”

“... to be sure, was self-inflicted: while a few of his fellow Etonians (Cyril Connolly, Harold Acton) were bursting precociously into print, Orwell chose to slave away in Parisian kitchens even when he was coughing up blood, sleep in dosshouses while cadging the odd ten shillings off his bemused parents, put in a spot of portering at ...”

“... school education while knowing her party will do nothing to alleviate it.24 January. ‘Well, love, the call’s going on’ is what my mother used to say in the early 1960s when I phoned from London, meaning that telephoning to them was still a luxury. On the rare occasions when I was at home and wanted to make a private call it had to be on the shop ...”

“... poems, and one’s self, will just be better or worse instances of familiar types. This is what Harold Bloom calls ‘the strong poet’s anxiety of influence’, his or her ‘horror of finding oneself to be only a copy or a replica’. On this reading of Larkin’s poem, what would it be to have succeeded in tracing home the ‘blind impress’ which all ...”

“... inspirations can crawl to die. Greenwich was stuffed with copies of Anna Pasternak’s Princess in Love. Dealers in the semi-authentic antiquarian bookshops groaned as hustlers with bulging golf carts and child buggies lurched in off the street. ‘We’ve got books. Got ‘em all. Cellar’s full. Sorry.’ Book graveyards are all that remains of ...”

“... of all privacy, said he had discovered, a year after his marriage to Vivien, that he was still in love with Miss Hale, though ‘it may merely have been my reaction against my misery with Vivienne’ – we are told that he gave her name the two extra letters when exasperated – ‘and desire to revert to an earlier situation.’ He attributes the muddle to ...”

“... them stretches the mysterious factory in which knowledge, self-awareness, observation, humour, love of art, are all hard at work at their business of chemical processing. Virginia Woolf wants to pull down the factory, to operate face to face in the open air. Christopher Isherwood, in some ways her most affectionate and enthusiastic disciple, went through ...”

“... speaks in these lines,’ and so on. Spender was not bashful about building on his success. As Harold Nicolson, who also helped his career, observed: ‘He is absolutely determined to become a leading writer.’ Being a ‘leading writer’, not merely a writer, mattered enormously to the young Spender, and this role required more than just writing. The ...”

“... his Church, turn out to be illusions. So instead of becoming an English Montherlant he falls in love with the people he formerly satirised, thinks his country is being regenerated and then betrayed during the war, and is so reactionary a Catholic that an Irishman, Conor Cruise O’Brien, denounces him.Indeed, the whole of his oeuvre has been read as an ...”

“... which includes the weave of the carpet under my bare feet, the moment I discovered my father’s love letters to my mother. I was about ten, mooching around his post-divorce home in Wiltshire, and in a furtive mood. He was gardening and I was peeved that he had not clocked how the hours drag for a bored child. Having nothing better to do, I lowered the drop ...”

“... century. In 1946, Murphy accompanied Sybille Bedford, with whom she had fallen passionately in love after leaving Arthur, on a strenuous and often rackety year-long peregrination through pre-tourist Mexico. (O, charmed and charming Sybille, when will someone write your biography?) In Bedford’s stylish mock-epic account of the trip, A Visit to Don Otavio ...”

“... to the Terror. The absolute freedom of the Enlightenment was the negation of trust, faith, love, life and history: all it meant was death by guillotine – ‘the coldest and meanest of all deaths’, Hegel said, ‘with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water’. Subsequent philosophical discussions of ...”

“... her, Bedford got a contract to write an entire book about the trial of John Bodkin Adams – the Harold Shipman of his time – at the Old Bailey that year. The book begins with the judge’s entrance, ‘trailing a wake of subtlety, of secret powers, age’ and ends three and a half weeks later with the not guilty verdict. In between, the book is structured ...”

“... He rather portentously advises Overt against marriage, whereupon the young writer sacrifices his love for the vivacious Marian Fancourt, goes off to Switzerland and writes a masterpiece. There’s a twist in the tail (and in the tale) as St George ends up marrying Ms Fancourt himself, but the whole thing strikes me as a pretty formulaic exercise and not at ...”