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“... aural shortcomings here are not an isolated instance in his work and bother even his admirers. For John Lucas, who admires Porter’s savage attacks on metropolitan manners, verbal clumsiness is simply the price to be paid for Porter’s fecundity and invention – the cost of weariness after years at the typewriter bashing the smoothies. For others perhaps ...”

“... profession and the other asylums of London (especially Hoxton) when necessary. Lamb’s brother John had urged him not to take on this task: it was typical of Lamb to say that he understood John’s reasons for saying this, and thought no less of him for it, while disregarding his advice. The history of the fate of insane ...”

“... other consists (or did in 1971) of playgoers for whom the theatre has never been the same since John Osborne, and if they don’t like a play they leave it in droves. Indeed, it sometimes seems that their chief pleasure in going to the theatre in Brighton is in leaving it, and leaving it as noisily as possible. In Beyond the Fringe the seats were going up ...”

“... in Belloc’s poem, ‘not before/Becoming an appalling bore’ himself. His war had begun, like Guy Crouchback’s in the ‘Sword of Honour’ trilogy, as a crusade against the forces of atheism and modernism; he was a bit old for service, but he was courageous, and, even when sober, enthusiastic for the cause. Unfortunately, his fellow officers in the ...”

“... or the bizarre hysterically whipping up into nightmare and nonsense (as in his description of John Lennon’s decline: ‘bed-ins, bag-ins, be-ins, in-ins’). But the effect of his often brilliant verbal delirium is to make things wordy and unreal, language warding off the experience it describes, whisking it away. So Hoolihan implausibly combines the ...”

“... to Nobby’s and drink nickel draft beers. As a flaneur at the café he ‘read everyone, from John Fante to Aldous Huxley to Lao-tzu. My favourite novel at the time was Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, about a down-and-out barfly – a bleak omen, in retrospect, of where my life would one day land.’ (The epigraph of Beautiful Things is a few lines from ...”

“... there’). There is a letter to the Sunday Times correcting the suggestion that Auden had snubbed Guy Burgess when he was in disgrace. It was true, Auden said, that he had been out when Burgess called, but that was all. ‘It would be dishonourable of me to deny a friendship because the party in question has become publicly notorious.’ There is a ...”

“... raped, but he is indifferent. Adiga wants us to see all this as emblematic of the new Indian tough guy, the murderous entrepreneur who will step over any number of dead bodies to get his way. The idea of a resentful, oppressed protagonist murdering his employer and getting away with it in pursuit of his ideal of social mobility is not much of a novelty. Any ...”

“... I don’t think he means to demonise Craft, tempted though biographers must be to find a fall guy (Humphrey Carpenter’s Britten biography found Peter Pears). But much of the original matter in Walsh’s new volume was supplied by the composer’s immediate family (particularly his grandson, John Stravinsky), who ...”

“... From a military perspective, climate change need not be a problem if it hurts the other guy more than it hurts ‘us’. Point out to Trump and his cronies that 214 million people in China are threatened by permanent drought, compared to the mere two million people in America’s Great Plains who depend on the drying-up Ogallala Aquifer, and see if ...”

“... Hearing the news on the Today programme this morning R. nearly cries. I met Bowie only once, at John Schlesinger’s sometime in the 1980s, and remember him as a slight, almost colourless figure, who was somehow Scots. M. calls later and recalls how someone he knew picked up Bowie when he was still David Jones. He offered to come round, bringing his guitar ...”

“... press, Parliament and public for the first time since emancipation. Eyre’s critics were led by John Stuart Mill, his supporters by the likes of Carlyle and Ruskin. But the issue for Mill and liberal opinion was the legality of the punitive actions, not the source of the protest, which was the social, political and economic oppression of the majority black ...”

“... the remains of Josef Mengele and giving congressional testimony about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, among other high-profile cases. He died nine years ago, but the colourful interviews and writings he left behind enable Hagerty to provide a substantial account. In 1984, Snow, a chain-smoker in cowboy boots, was invited to Argentina by the ...”

“... have a memory of sitting there and feeling smug,’ she wrote of attending a class taught by John Crowe Ransom in 1938. She identified as a Trotskyite, placing herself on the anti-Stalinist left along with the writers she admired: Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy.Hardwick wanted to flee to New York, like ‘a provincial in Balzac, yearning ...”

“... War movement was the same man who had, half a century before, hounded Emma Goldman and John Reed and, later, put Leon Trotsky under surveillance in Mexico. This longevity makes Hoover’s biography a wonderful subject. Powers’s book is painfully neutral and somewhat pedestrian at times, but his authoritative command of his sources makes it ...”