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“... one fact which makes the case worth pursuing is the involvement of Shakespeare’s former landlord Christopher Mountjoy. There is an obvious link: like the three goldworkers, Mountjoy was French. Also like them, he lived in the Cripplegate area (though his house was within the London city walls, on respectable Silver Street, whereas the alleged fornicators ...”

“... as sly, as haunted. A cross between Stevie Smith and Beckett: a good-humoured, sweet Beckett.’ Christopher Middleton writes: ‘Well before the 1920s, the text for Walser is a non-thing, as much so as a Cubist guitar or Magritte’s apple (“Ceci n’est pas une pomme”).’* Other comparisons include the composer Satie, the painter Rousseau, the ...”

“... Walker, who he wished to make Foreign Secretary in preference to the even more hideous George Brown, and was thus subjected to the vast annoyance of a by-election which he went on to mishandle badly. In the case of the brutish conduct of Smith, Wilson was being made to look a fool. He was also being tested as to whether there was any outrage committed by ...”

“... He thought of calling it ‘Ah, Poor America!’ but it was generally known as ‘The Little Brown Brothers’. (Fante had a sort of anti-talent for titles; Wait Until Spring, Bandini is reminiscent of nothing so much as Woody Allen’s ‘No Kaddish for Weinstein’. He considered giving Dago Red the title of one of the stories in it, ‘The Odyssey of ...”

“... treats him to a passing tip of the hat while he evokes the great magazines – as a friend of ‘Christopher North’ and the man who hid from his creditors under Blackwood’s table. ‘North’ (John Wilson) had invited De Quincey to Edinburgh, in the hope that he would provide him with lectures for his Edinburgh Professorship of Moral Philosophy – a ...”

“... he called at his house, he said: ‘Guys, what about launching a paper?’ We decided we would and Christopher Logue was deputed to go to what’s now the British Library to look into possible names. I’d said: ‘I’m totally opposed to traditional left names – “Workers’ this”, or “Socialist that”. The people who are coming into politics are not ...”

“... the interpretation eloquently enshrined in the great Lutyens Memorial published in 1950, where Christopher Hussey, in his 600-page biography, and A. S. G. Butler, in his three volumes of plans, plates and commentary, acclaimed our Ned as ‘the greatest artist in building whom Britain has produced’. Lutyens’s star was already in eclipse when this ...”

“... Kilmartin had in mind in advancing his hypothesis. As for ‘mômes’ coming out as ‘a bit of brown’, this misses the point of Charlus’s tortured verbal behaviour; it is not just a lapse of literary judgment but an actual category-mistake. For, even as his incredible tirades shift into semi-delirious overdrive, ‘a bit of ...”

“... we come to believe most strongly in Jackself’s isolation. Wren’s name sounds familiar – like Christopher Robin, say, or Jenny Wren who reattaches the maid’s nose in ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ – but we can’t quite place him. He’s like an imaginary friend, the fruit of a lonesome mind that’s learned to flirt and toy with random parts of ...”

“... a study of Wells’s composition methods, H.G. Wells under Revision (1990, co-edited with Christopher Rolfe), and the reissue of Wells’s scientific romances currently appearing under the World’s Classics imprint. (For copyright reasons – Wells having died in 1946 – this series will probably only be available in America.) Parrinder’s more ...”

“... Patterson, married Lewis Sheridan Leary in 1858. The following year, Leary was recruited by John Brown for his suicidal raid on Harpers Ferry, and the bullet-riddled shawl that was eventually returned to Mary was in due course used as a blanket for the infant Langston (a middle name – he was baptised James, after his father). Mary’s next husband, Charles ...”

“... Ian – chastised him ‘by banging a serving spoon on his offensively prominent ear trumpet’. Christopher Isherwood, on the other hand, found that Maugham’s stammer ‘somehow made you feel that you were stammering, not he’. Raymond Mortimer noted his ‘very violent temper’. In his later years, visitors described him as ‘saurian’ or compared ...”

“... days saving indigenous Canadians in the name of ‘the brotherhood of all men, white and red and brown’. The Island of Sheep (1936) proposes a similar brotherhood between the angry African tribesmen who save the day in the backstory and the angry Norwegian whale hunters who do the same in the main plot. Buchan’s idiosyncratic Toryism finds its fullest ...”

“... Price); a memoir by its most senior diplomat, the former ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer; and now memoirs by the former prime minister’s wife, his deputy and his bagman. The granddaddy of them all, Blair’s own memoirs, are still to come. It is an unprecedented cascade of memoirs by prominent figures in a government which ...”

“... sleeps. What do they smell like? Like honey, steeping the sunshine. What do they look like? Like a brown and purple cloud-shadow spread out across the uplands, described by William Atkins in characteristically fine focus when he says of the North Yorkshire moors that ‘the new blooms were silverish specks; they were pale grey, beige and mint green. I picked a ...”