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“... a series of focus groups run by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation every year, in which representative cross-sections of society identify a reasonable household budget: carpets and tiles, sofas, lampshades, toasters, microwaves, mobile phones, babysitting and childcare are all seen as necessary if household members are ‘to participate in society’. Poverty has ...”

“... by their uneasy and ambiguous homosexuality. For Mann being German came first, and he learned, as Anthony Heilbut rather quaintly puts it, to read German history as one long queer epic – he alluded to Frederick the Great’s homosexuality and depicted Bismarck as ‘hysterical and high-pitched’. When considering literary history, he enjoyed ...”

“... in the preparations for the King’s coronation but walked into Better Books in the Charing Cross Road and discovered George Barker’s poetry. Then and there she decided to annex him, to become poet and lover at one go, as her namesake Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice decides to annex Darcy, since ‘to be mistress of Pemberly might be ...”

“... had to be good’. But ‘good’ isn’t good enough as a category.) Last year’s promotion of Anthony Burgess to official Grand Old Man was a case in point. After years of getting respectful, rather than ecstatic reviews, and of writing the sort of books which perhaps aren’t naturally suited to the British book-reader, Burgess suddenly turns 70 and ...”

“... centre-left activists – Neal Lawson is the latest on the chopping block – for countenancing cross-party co-operation.Everyone agrees that Starmer puts victory ahead of any political commitment: power, he says, is the ‘object of the exercise’. His diagnosis of Labour’s failures goes beyond claiming that the party fails adequately to reflect its ...”

“... Inmates make regular return visits to the old dwelling, rather like the returning dead in Anthony Minghella’s film Truly, Madly, Deeply. The ghosts’ favourite video was Brief Encounter, which they watched so often that they all knew the dialogue by heart and couldn’t resist mouthing it ahead of the actors. Their shepherd from beyond (Alan ...”

“... props in the Ken Tynan legend assembly-kit, along with the Mickey Mouse watch and effete-aesthete Anthony Blanche outfits he wore at Oxford, and, later, the poolstick collection of headmaster’s canes he kept handy to beat women’s bottoms. The cigarettes eventually killed him, but it is only with one in his hand that he looks fully activated, in ...”

“... circumstances, their place is taken by a security-cleared counsel instructed by the court, who cross-examines the witnesses and generally assists the court to test the strength of the state’s case. I believe this oversimplified the position in Canada, where there has been a considerable volume of litigation in relation to closed material. Be that as it ...”

“... Foxe’s Book of Martyrs to the Book of Common Prayer. Suggestive and rarely predictable, these cross-cuttings place even the most familiar texts in a new light. One of the anthology’s most dense introductory essays, on the ‘small compass and tight formal constraints’ of the sonnet, could apply equally well to its own powers of compression. Rule-bound ...”

“... in A Whistling Woman’s own symbolic repertoire. (As she did in Babel Tower, where she brought on Anthony Burgess as a witness for the defence in her fictional obscenity trial, Byatt enjoys mixing real people with her imaginary ones, even as she accords some of the latter the extended life of characters in Balzac: another episode of Through the Looking-Glass ...”

“... British novelists who went off to the war in mid-career in their mid-thirties, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, both wrote books about what they had seen at first hand, Waugh’s war being more overtly interesting (the Commandos, Crete, parachute training, Yugoslavia) but Powell’s more typical (garrison duties, staff work, office politics). In ...”

“... a good-natured dig but spot-on – and Richmal Crompton, whose William has very little time for ‘Anthony Martin’, whom he once encounters in the flesh. Yet William is an equally reassuring figure, whom we know will grow up sound, just as Milne himself did, according to the not unmalicious eulogy propounded by Frank Swinnerton. Milne is so far out of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Schmitt refuses to speculate on the antecedents of his medieval phantoms in earlier belief or on cross-pollination with cultures ancient and distant. But he allows glimpses, when he cites Scottish tales recorded by William of Newburgh in the 12th century, or the village hauntings taken down by the monk of Byland in Yorkshire two hundred years later, in which ...”

“... to the rites of the Church he has just saved from thousands of its foes, he stabs the altar cross, spills the holy water and swears to live for ever as God’s enemy. In interviews Coppola and the author of the screenplay, James V. Hart, have insisted on the gripping irony of this situation and on their sense of Dracula as a fallen angel. Great love in ...”