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“... paper. There were heady moments. In the course of a feud with Number 10 he decided to sue Harold Wilson and the head of the Civil Service for denying the newspaper the usual advance copies of the Honours List. ‘I did not have a watertight legal case,’ he admits, but counsel were engaged and a vacation judge was alerted. If Number 10 had not caved in it ...”

“... were Jacques Barzun, R.P. Blackmur, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Delmore Schwartz, Allen Tate, Kenneth Burke, Robert Fitzgerald, Leslie Fiedler and John Crowe Ransom – this last its founder as a school of literary criticism ‘to teach those who teach it’. Marianne Moore, in Brooklyn, had a quieter time, but was just as much in touch with them all ...”

“... the present crisis. The traditional social democratic solution, tried by George Brown and Harold Wilson in the Sixties and by Michael Foot and Jim Callaghan in the Seventies, is the ‘social contract’ – a private deal between the Government and the unions, by which the unions trade wage restraint in return for extensions of their organisational ...”

“... Texas fraudmeisters, a disaster locked into place by Davis’s Republican predecessor, Pete Wilson, whose advisers are now clustering around Schwarzenegger like flies in a privy. Davis hardly helped, renewing the corrupt contracts and allowing Texas corporations to sell California’s energy back to California at an obscene mark-up. Last ...”

“... basis of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ and ‘William Wilson’, and his literary aesthetic asserted in dozens of reviews as well as prefaces to his poetry and story collections, he pulled off one of the most famous stunts in newspaper history. Somehow he persuaded the editor of the New York Sun to publish an ...”

“... Command Performance of the film: ‘Tony saw Love Story in New York. Hated it.’ When Dennis Main Wilson says, ‘Ma’am, I have the honour to produce a little show called Till Death Us Do Part,’ she cuts down his faux modesty with: ‘Isn’t that that frightfully dreary thing in the East End?’ At the end of Carousel at the National Theatre, Richard ...”

“... time stops, the external world of rain and loud wind vanishes. It has been suggested by Kenneth Eble that the effect of following this moment with the newly interpolated material (introduced by way of an abrupt scene change to Gatsby’s interview with ‘an ambitious young reporter’) is to prolong the preceding scene and make it reverberate in ...”

“... SIB board to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Gordon Brown as genial and forthright in his way as Kenneth Clarke had been last year in his. First sight of lightly-bearded Alistair Darling, who strikes me as if chosen from a thousand aspirants to be cast as Iago at Covent Garden: is it, I wonder, an advantage in political life to look quite so operatically ...”

“... mismatch of Abbott and Costello and closer to the exasperated camaraderie of Laurel and Hardy; as Kenneth Tynan put it, they were ‘no longer comic and stooge, but egoists in more or less equal competition’. They still told jokes and performed in sketches that required only caricature-acting, but now their roles were blurring to the point at which they ...”

“... that the American left should be more critical of Stalin, urging his Partisan Review colleague Kenneth Fearing to visit the Soviet Union and give him a report he could trust: ‘I made a political blind date and maybe the dame ain’t nothing like she sounded over the phone.’ In 1943, aged 32, he was drafted to Rome on what he called ‘a military ...”

“... for reasons which I wholly understand, this experience was not vouchsafed to Mr Gaitskell, Mr Wilson, Mr Brown, Mr Jay and the other leading members of the Labour front bench.’ This probably made little impact on Gaitskell and Co, but for Macmillan’s generation the fact that the entire Labour front bench had avoided active service was something to be ...”

“... He obviously enjoyed being made much of and he liked a good junket. A trip to Japan with Angus Wilson was particularly rewarding. At one striptease club, as Wilson recorded, ‘when word went round that we were Spender and Wilson – every single person in the place asked for our ...”

“... sculpture for the Italian Renaissance, there was an unruliness in Turner and Constable, as against Wilson, say, which made them radically transform rather than imitate their model. They took Claude’s compositions as theatres within which to work out their personal obsessions. Turner bombarded scenes out of Claude with brilliant light, at once decomposing and ...”

“... in 1967, Attlee began to be missed and appreciated. As the Labour Party ran slowly downhill under Wilson, Callaghan and Foot, Attlee shuffled uphill to join the immortals. Comparisons between past and present told heavily in Attlee’s favour, and the golden age of 1945 took its place in Labour mythology. Both Left and Right of the Party looked back to 1945 ...”

“... contrary to the strict Islamic custom’. Strict Christian custom, likewise, is defied by Kenneth Toomey in his ‘arresting opening’ to Earthly Powers: ‘It was the afternoon of my 81st birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me ... ’ And Toomey’s bedfellow maliciously warns his ...”