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“... pieces like ‘The Third Baby’s the Easiest’ and ‘The Night We All Had Grippe’. Joan Wylie Hall, in her 1993 book about Jackson’s short fiction, claims that ‘her name is the only one that is now at all familiar in issue after issue’ of magazines aimed ‘exclusively at a female readership’. In The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood imagines sitting in ...”

“... would not affront the portraits of dead Wardens, gazing down from the slowly mellowing oak of the Hall.And now Christie, from The Body in the Library – or rather, three of her typically short paragraphs: The knock came at the door. Automatically from the depths of her dreams Mrs Bantry said, ‘Come in.’ The door opened – now there would be the chink of ...”

“... The exhibition had been sponsored by the Observer, at that time peopled with fabled beings like Kenneth Tynan, Edward Crankshaw and C.A. Lejeune, a socially and intellectually glamorous world, particularly to Michael Frayn, one of a group of us who went to the exhibition. But, of course, London itself was beginning to seem glamorous then – the Coffee ...”

“... Sean O’Casey. In 1956 in London he played – to much critical acclaim from critics such as Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson – the part of Seamus Shields in The Shadow of a Gunman. When he was asked to play the part of the railway porter in Beckett’s radio play All That Fall in 1956 he found himself ‘struck tremendously by the writing. It seemed to ...”

“... his Lionel Bart tendency. The production numbers that animate his pitch, so that he can be a music hall turn as well as a scholarship boy. A fabulous exuberance and a chameleon respect, that has him becoming, or seeming to become, the thing he witnesses. ‘The eye altering alters all.’ He offers a sympathetic reading to Blake’s ‘babooneries’, the ...”

“... a bang, but the rest knew nothing until, about twenty minutes later, Mr Kebede appeared in the hall in his stockinged feet, saying there was a fire in his flat. He thought it had started at the back of his fridge. He called the police before going to the door of his next-door neighbour, Maryam Adam, who was three months pregnant. ‘It was exactly 12.50 ...”

“... American literary scene in all its brash bravura and high stakes providing a Radio City Music Hall backdrop for even celebrity-averse writers such as Roth to achieve stardom. That Roth made it a lasting stardom is a testament to a relentless work ethic and a bottomless faith in the value and vocation of literature; he didn’t try to smooth down the ...”

“... texts of the modern history of slavery, John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom in 1947 and Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution in 1956, has any serious history book claimed that slavery was a benign paternalistic institution. No one has argued that it was anything other than the great moral stain on the American conscience. The view that the ...”

“... four lawns. The leaves of the cypress trees almost obscured the vivid blue dome over the prayer hall. Mr Rafi’i hadn’t arrived. I walked to the far end of the courtyard, and sat down on a marble platform that supported one of the porticos. Some seminarians were crossing the courtyard on their way to class. A few were reading on the balconies of the ...”

“... senior politician often seems to spell trouble. Patricia Sowter, the executive head of the Cuckoo Hall Academy Trust in Enfield, was so admired by Gove that she’s quoted at length, in a special box, in his 2010 Education White Paper, on the subject of the ‘new academy freedoms’. In February, the EFA sent the trust a Notice to Improve letter after an ...”

“... overlapped: I became fascinated, for example, with the long World War One sequence in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. I read up on butch lady ambulance-drivers at the Western Front. But the world had not yet retracted to a grey, dugout-sized, lobe-gripping monomania.Then, starting in my thirties, things seemed to intensify. I was in England ...”

“... called The Old Mill or The Old Forge or The Old Rectory. All of them, I imagine, with prams in the hall. Cyril Connolly’s strictures on this point may have been one of the reasons Larkin claimed The Condemned Playground as his sacred book and which led him, meeting Connolly, uncharacteristically to blurt out: ‘You formed me.’ But if his definition of ...”

“... the only person mostly missing from the intimate cavalcade of biddable and beddable is Radclyffe Hall, author of the notorious lesbian tear-jerker The Well of Loneliness (1928). But even she makes oblique appearances. De Acosta was wont to describe Garland’s stone-butch girlfriend of the 1920s, the hatchet-faced Dorothy (‘Dody’) Todd, pioneering editor ...”

“... sort of busy bee.I’m not suggesting you were some foppish, would-be West End theatre figure like Kenneth Tynan. When you started ‘Tomorrow’, though, you must already have had a group of collaborators and contributors you could nobble for the next issue.I’d enjoyed bringing out the Scorpion and had always remembered it. Then I met a Sri Lankan, Susil ...”