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“... near-homophonous Alistair MacNeill; two of his screenplays had already been turned into novels by John Denis; and a third screenplay is undergoing similar treatment by Simon Gandolfi. In this curious world there are occasional legal hiccups. One such, not so much a hiccup as a cardiac arrest, recently befell HarperCollins when they were prosecuted and heavily ...”

“... place in Highgate.’ He adapts the tone and texture of other ex-spooks who ‘went over’: Ian Fleming, John le Carré. He admits that his dialogue is invented, all his East End villains are squeezed into one composite character, Mickey Williams. MI6 became nervous of the Marks connection in the wake of the Littlejohn ...”

“... effort of honesty and rationality seems to be needed – but the problem is so fantasy-ridden. John Updike’s story ‘Transaction’ in his latest book of short stories shows the prostitution bargain from the side of the male partner: his confusion about her blank availability and boredom, his attempts both to reach her as a real person and to use her in ...”

“... three most prominent Oxford professors of English since the war have all been populist pretenders. John Carey, scourge of Modernist ‘intellectuals’ and reliable dribbler of cold water on all forms of overheated aestheticism, comes across as the last defender of sensible English decency. Terry Eagleton, with his blokeish binarisms and comic’s ...”

“... Oxfordshire and Bloomsbury, where Philipps was colonised by the Stracheys: Lytton was his mentor, John got him into left-wing politics, and at various points he was in analysis with James and in bed with Julia. Philipps’s father funded him while he tried to develop a career as a painter, but even by the lowish standards of Bloomsbury he was a terrible ...”

“... After 1578, native and foreign scholars – above all Alfonso Chacón, Pompeo Ugonio, the Fleming Philips van Winghe and the Maltese-born Antonio Bosio – set out to study the catacombs systematically. It was a huge and inaccessible site: there are sixty separate catacombs, though only thirty or so were known before recent times. They comprised a ...”

“... sometimes metamorphose inside themselves. ‘In the early Thirties, no writer did more than Peter Fleming (1907-71) to convince older people that the younger generation was “all right”.’ It is a serviceable formula, and its use couldn’t be called sardonic. But impassivity here reaches the level of art. Being ‘all right’, or being thought to be ...”

“... might turn without professional harm to Ransome’s tales from those of Conan Doyle and Fleming. After all, they have been similarly successful. Swallows and Amazons appeared in 1930, when Ransome was 46. By 1948, one million copies of it and its 11 sequels had been sold. The Puffin edition of Swallows and Amazons has been reprinted 18 times since ...”

“... men than me have meant less.’ So it’s possible to see how commissioning a Marlowe novel from John Banville, whose agent represents the Chandler estate too, might have struck all the parties involved as an inspired piece of stunt casting. A disciple of Proust, Nabokov and Beckett, an admirer of German Romanticism and 17th-century painting, a reimaginer of ...”

“... known as Ludwik) – remain unmatched. Sorge has always attracted particular attention. Ian Fleming called him the ‘most formidable spy in history’; other admirers included John le Carré, Tom Clancy and General MacArthur. Owen Matthews – whose new biography of Sorge is the fifth to appear in English – is well ...”

“... interests confined to Shakespeare: among those the countess patronised were James Thomson, John Gay and George Frideric Handel (of whom she painted a portrait), all of them occasional guests at the Ashley-Cooper family seat, St Giles House, at Wimborne St Giles in Dorset.My interest was much piqued by the fact that I knew the Wimborne St Giles ...”

“... and the formidable Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear-Admiral Godfrey, and his assistant Ian Fleming. Their meetings must have been fun. Godfrey, brilliant but acerbic, called the RAF the Royal Advertisement Service, and dismissed the Army as the ‘evacuees’, the people the Navy had had to fish out of the sea at Dunkirk, Crete and ...”

“... to study if they didn’t want to. There were no marks or prizes, and no punishments were imposed. John Betjeman described it as ‘a co-educational school to which modern authors and intellectuals send their sons’. Freud had no interest in academic subjects. Instead, he was fascinated by horses, and remained fascinated all of his life. One of his school ...”

“... In Arthur Schlesinger’s court history, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which might without unfairness be called the founding breviary of the cult of JFK, there appears the following vignette. Schlesinger had been asked to carpenter a ‘White Paper’ justifying Washington’s destabilisation of Cuba, in which the high-flown rhetoric of the New Frontier might form a sort of scab over the fouler business of empire ...”

“... renaissance, is also concerned with what might have been, and with a legend which has run from Sir John Holles to S.R. Gardiner. He shows Henry as heir to the aspirations of the Sidney circle, a patron of the arts, and a champion of the Protestant cause. Whether the English financial system would have permitted Henry as king to have championed the Protestant ...”