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“... turn of his intellectual pursuits and his habit of divination has gained him a reputation as the Harry Potter of Ancient Rome (figulus is Latin for ‘potter’).The late Republic was a period of intense cultural production as well as political turmoil. ‘These so learned times’, as Cicero described them, produced an unprecedented number of works on ...”

“... news showed snowy scenes instead of the student marchers being punched in the face. Newsnight’s Paul Mason visited the SOAS occupation the following day to accuse them of ‘polite outrage’ and of not being sufficiently like 68ers. Even to Newsnight it’s about fees or protest as a rite of passage: no one is talking about the fundamental reorganisation ...”

“... fuzzes the shadowy outline of Ian Penman, a laureate of marginal places, folds in the map, is that Paul Schrader, the director of a sassy remake of Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People, admired Penman’s review so much that he invited him over to Los Angeles to talk product. Penman in California was truly the vision of a man who fell to earth, a pale alien in an X ...”

“... and snow’. The mourners make their way along the ‘tatters’ of the old, winding road, passing Harry and Gwen Williams’s cottage, where Raymond grew up. Assembled in the churchyard, ‘Raymond’s young men’ (as his wife, Joy, used to call them) are now middle-aged and showing signs of wear and tear, ‘thinning and unkempt hair ... a bad back here, a ...”

“... D.H. Lawrence of Sons and Lovers, a book he sometimes taught. There, the young Lawrence figure, Paul Morel, long at odds with his father, also feels when his mother dies an irresistible relief from emotional smothering, even though he adored and had tended her. It is symptomatic of Atlas’s uptight, prejudicial feelings about Bellow, and particularly about ...”

“... the London Magazine. Now it is put forward, somewhat polemically, by GMP, with an introduction by Paul Binding (who is, I believe, working on a critical biography of Stephen Spender). Binding argues that Worsley’s novel gains from a historically-distanced perspective on the fusion of high-born philanthropy, political romanticism and homo-erotic cultism ...”

“... precursor of James Joyce in the world of elaborate wordplay, and critics have long thought so. Harry Levin suggested in 1941 that Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty was ‘the official guide’ to the vocabulary of Finnegans Wake. Why wouldn’t he be? He was the inventor of the portmanteau word (‘You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings ...”

“... the last election he was able to follow all the way through was the one four years earlier, when Harry Truman beat Thomas Dewey (no relation) in one of the great upsets in US presidential history. This was the election that is remembered for the photo of a triumphant Truman holding up an edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune announcing that Dewey had beaten ...”

“... personality we know very little, is ranked among the greatest of theologians, next only to St Paul and St Augustine. Of his publications, the centrepiece is the dauntingly hefty Summa Theologiae. In its dry, brisk, low-key manner, this formidable compendium of theology, metaphysics, ethics and psychology ranges from Thomas’s celebrated demonstrations of ...”

“... direction of Heaton were half full in the morning and nobody spoke. When I arrived at the house of Paul Wakefield I immediately saw a picture of his handsome younger brother on the coffee table. ‘He was my bodyguard,’ Paul said. ‘He was always quite tough, but brave. He was my hero and he always will be.’ ...”

“... treats Crommelynck’s work with just though brief respect, and lists that Le Cocu was reviewed by Paul Morand in La Nouvelle Revue Française in 1921, its first year. It is thus not quite true that the beautiful innocence of the quarrelsome mind of Joyce, his complete lack of snobbery when confronted with literary merit, saved him from getting cross about his ...”

“... died in 1958, at the age of 47), Back in the Jug Agane (1959). Unlike his 1990s successor, Harry Potter – the name of Potter’s school, ‘Hogwarts’, is surely derived from ‘The Hogwarts’, a Latin play by Marcus Plautus Molesworthus – Molesworth does not have adventures; instead he daydreams, ruminates and observes. The subtitle to Down with ...”

“... maniac, and we are encouraged to suspect eccentric old ladies and retired naval officers, Harry the fisherman and his small-boy pal, Killer, while feeling mildly compassionate toward the innocent, the potential victims and suspects. But the author has tried to make the book more challenging than Agatha Christie’s yarns. Randolph Stow, we are ...”

“... he launched his new journal, the Banker, in 1926, and recruited to it such financial experts as Paul Einzig. Two years later, he persuaded Eyre and Spottis-woode to purchase a newspaper group that included the Economist, the Investors Chronicle and the Financial News as well. Long before his 30th year, he was established as a wealthy and successful ...”

“... president won the Pulitzer Prize? And are the science fiction stories H.P. Lovecraft ghosted for Harry Houdini not the best things he ever wrote? There would be a touch of all this in the strange case of Assange. But there is something else about the genre, a sense that the world might be more ghosted now than at any time in history. Isn’t Wikipedia ...”