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“... Pound, who admired his combination of old-world Tory manners and avant-garde sympathies, and from Graham Greene, who imitated his techniques, notably in The End of the Affair. These writers and many others of many stripes – Herbert Read, D.H. Lawrence, Hugh Walpole, for instance – admired him because he was shrewd and helpful about the business of ...”

“... the reader in his expert grip, and to keep meaning under control. They are secrets, not mysteries. Graham Greene and George Orwell may have been closer models for McEwan (I am thinking of the scene in Down and Out in Paris and London, when Orwell, in the doss-house, is woken up ‘by a dim impression of some large brown thing coming towards me. I opened my ...”

“... murder by the IRA of his close friend and colleague in the Queen’s University law faculty, Edgar Graham, in 1983. (When the murder was announced over the tannoy in the Queen’s student union, Republican students cheered.) For those who remember the 1970s and 1980s Godson’s detailed account brings back a number of horrible events – the shock not only of ...”

“... was when they were under the dual (and somewhat divided) control of Brian Epstein and George Martin, both of whom had set out to manufacture a marketable product rather than inspire great musical achievements. A recent biography of Epstein emphasised the four musicians’ profound relief when at last they allowed themselves to break up (‘I’m not a ...”

“... and war, and the selection provides a sober roll-call: Ida B. Wells, Aneurin Bevan, Rachel Carson, Martin Luther King, Václav Havel, Ken Saro-Wiwa. Its portrayal of the first half of the century has solidity; you are in safe, if stubby hands. There are also some poignant contributions: the broken dreams of Communism reported by former believers; Rabbi Stephen ...”

“... God and helps save mother Poland. It’s all very simple, sentimental and ‘uncooked’ (to use Graham Greene’s term). And its well-intentioned soppiness matches the romantic expectations of the 1981 thaw. After the crackdown, Orwell’s consigning Boxer to the knacker’s yard seems a more plausible outcome. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is a very different ...”

“... US Senate candidates: Raphael Warnock, a pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr had preached, and Jon Ossoff, who had interned with the Georgia civil rights hero, John Lewis, who died last July. (Warnock presided at Lewis’s funeral.) And on the morning of 6 January, both Warnock and Ossoff were declared victors in the ...”

“... at the choice of 15 January for the deadline, because it is the officially celebrated birthday of Martin Luther King and many felt that Bush either knew this and did not care or, worse still, had not noticed. But, except for a fistful of Trotskyists, all those attending the rally in Lafayette Park last weekend were complaining of the financial cost of the war ...”

“... hair and prominent teeth’. Description of scenery has that careful enigmatic ordinariness that Graham Greene does better: ‘She had opened a latticed Moorish door to the small sunny courtyard outside and moved her chair to sit beside it. An olive tree grew from the dry soil in the middle of the court. Two thirsty-looking potted orange trees sat on the ...”

“... in a golden, occasionally leaden, age of light verse (Chesterton, Beerbohm, Wodehouse, Harry Graham, Baring, Squire, Seaman, ‘Evoe’ and, improbably, Housman, along with many others, not forgetting the prolific Anon). Even the newspapers published well-turned light verse daily and the postal schools of journalism began to teach the tricks of the trade ...”

“... for self-contained affirmation within a world of dreams. Victor Baxter, the fictitious narrator of Graham Greene’s The Captain and the Enemy, is a lot less sanguine about his – abortive – literary career; he has no literary prizes to flagellate himself for winning in the manner of the en-Nobelled White. Victor is a sorry figure all round. His mother dies ...”

“... at the intersection of patronage and poverty. There is another cloak joke in Don Quixote, about St Martin who divided his with a poor man: ‘from which we may conclude that it was a cold day for such was the saint’s charity that had it been a warm one he would doubtless have given the poor man his whole cloak.’ Cervantes was poor for a purely literary ...”

“... been at work. With Steinbeck one can guess what the factors were. Europeans have always had what Graham Greene called a ‘fetish’ about him. It was a lucky stroke that The Grapes of Wrath – with its broad sentimentality about endurance under intolerable pressure – was published in England in the month that war was declared. Scandinavians have a ...”

“... Social Justice Commission. The ice-cool Hewitt rose to fame in the 1970s, when she replaced Martin Loney as general secretary of the National Council for Civil Liberties after he was ousted in a coup. She narrowly lost Leicester East for Labour in 1983, was a prominent member of the Institute for Public Policy Research, Labour’s think tank, and one of ...”

“... and statements about truth. The other day I came across a long forgotten interview I did with Graham Greene in 1963. Speaking of The End of the Affair, he said that he had made ‘an appalling mistake’ in that novel, and the mistake was ‘the introduction of something which had not got a natural explanation’. He found it impossible to carry on with ...”