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“... for a walk through the empty town, got a drink at an empty bar, then went back to my room to read Anthony Burgess’s autobiography.’ The next day, having decided to catch the ferry across to Sardinia, ‘I bought a croissant and a cup of coffee, and then climbed to the fort and walked along the cliff path and found a warm rock and read my ...”

“... were obstinately denying independence to the country – Churchill most obstinately of all. Guy Burgess was one of those – James Klugmann and John Cornford were the chief – who helped to induct me into the Party. We belonged to the same college, and hence to the same ‘cell’. I remember Burgess as a rather ...”

“... voice, which was made worse by his tuberculosis. In George Orwell’s Perverse Humanity, Glenn Burgess argues that Orwell’s experiences in Spain made him a revolutionary socialist (Orwell himself used a capital S), which he remained until the end of his life – the attacks on the totalitarian consequences of revolutions in Animal Farm and Nineteen ...”

“... Levin(Sunday Times)Blake Morrison(TLS)John Nicholson(Times)Richard Rayner(Time Out)Anthony Thwaite(Observer)MiddlingPaul Ableman(Spectator)Peter Conrad(Harpers & Queen)Alan Hollinghurst(New Statesman)Christopher Wordsworth(Guardian)UnfavourablePaul Ableman(Spectator)Robert Cottrell(Financial Times)Martyn Goff(Daily Telegraph)John Osborne(New ...”

“... the Independent by Charlotte Philby, Kim Philby’s granddaughter, prompted by the publication of Anthony Blunt’s apologia released by the British Library. Not surprisingly she draws an unfavourable comparison between Blunt and Philby, bolstered by happy family pictures of her grandfather in Moscow. There’s not much point, it seems to me, in apportioning ...”

“... possibly by Ludwik, the third of these Soviet spies, who probably recruited Kim Philby, to Philby, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Philby dropped all his communist contacts and joined the pro-Nazi Anglo-German Fellowship, which made it easier for him to get access to Franco’s forces in Spain as a ...”

“... he was preparing to become George Smiley; he ‘could never make close ties with people’. Guy Burgess was ‘always dirty and smelt’. This diary is also a love story: ‘The sun was shining and Alan took my hand.’ Eva Taylor considers her husband ‘cleverer than Macaulay’, whose works he reads to her, along with Gulliver’s Travels and The Diary ...”

“... missing seems to have been some diaries and papers which are restricted during the lifetime of Anthony West, and the correspondence with Beaverbrook, which Rebecca and Max burned together at her flat in 1930. With great skill Victoria Glendinning concentrates attention on the story she has been asked to tell. Rebecca was to the end, as one of her ...”

“... joy of reading the letter’ containing what Julian called ‘great news’: he was sleeping with Anthony Blunt – his ‘first love affair’. She realised then that he ‘meant to tell me things. I had never expected it.’ After Blunt Julian’s affairs were heterosexual, but there were quite a few of them, they often ran concurrently and he provided a ...”

“... was first published in 1949. It has twice been brought up to date, once in 1965 to accommodate Burgess and Maclean – ‘among others’, as the blurb mildly puts it – and now with an introduction in which to receive Anthony Blunt. The new prefatory statement is interesting in itself, and throws light on the already ...”

“... nicer than I actually find it, which is rather routine, but some of the most memorable passages in Anthony Powell’s Journals and James Lees-Milne’s Diaries are to do with meals, particularly with Lees-Milne’s meals during the war or the years of austerity. Somewhere he talks about a pudding of treacle pancakes and cream which even now makes my mouth ...”

“... Howard, the poet and journalist who is Miles Malpractice in Vile Bodies and ‘two-thirds’ of Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited (the other third, Evelyn Waugh said, was Harold Acton). Howard is now best known for a single hateful phrase (‘anybody over the age of thirty seen in a bus has been a failure in life’), which is a pity, because the new ...”

“... for instance, though nothing quite so unexpected as a presentation copy of some art book signed by Anthony Blunt that turned up round the corner in Age Concern.15 September. Much missed these shameful days is Tom Bingham, the ex-lord chief justice and legal philosopher, who would have had Johnson scuttling for cover. Both from Balliol, one a credit to the ...”

“... Ava Gardner, Judy Garland, Henry Hathaway, Van Heflin, Fritz Lang, Burt Lancaster, Audie Murphy, Burgess Meredith, Groucho Marx, Vincente Minnelli, Gregory Peck, Vincent Price, Robert Ryan, Edward G. Robinson, Donna Reed, Nicholas Ray, Robert Siodmak, Frank Sinatra, Sylvia Sidney, Claire Trevor, Franchot Tone, Walter Wanger, Keenan Wynn, William Wyler, Orson ...”

“... ego. The most famous and successful venture in homosexual ventriloquism by a novelist is still Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers. I had doubts about the book when it came out in 1980, disliking the easy equation of homosexuality with cowardliness, even though this was an equation accepted by many homosexuals of the generation of ...”