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“... tell us something about Miss Bergman’s capacity for self-deception that she could neither leave Alan Burgess alone to write her biography nor sit down and write her own? Instead, they did it together, the actress and the author. Mr Burgess wrote The Small Woman, from which Miss Bergman’s 41st film, The Inn of the ...”

“... survey of post-war fiction. In the late Fifties and after, Kingsley Amis, Johns Wain and Braine, Alan Sillitoe and Co struck a new, demotic note. The ‘traditional’ English novel of good and bad manners was radicalised and updated. Karl Miller helped to institute a new criticism which seemed to owe more to a modest, clean, unadorned English than to the ...”

“... more than one able biographer. Morrison received a full and sympathetic scholarly appraisal, while Alan Bullock’s magisterial biography of Bevin ran to three volumes. Dalton, abruptly replaced by Cripps at the Treasury in 1947, was strikingly restored to historical attention, in large part thanks to Ben Pimlott’s commanding biography. If Cripps’s stature ...”

“... in Howards End). He’s less obviously out of the same box as Coral Browne, who, visiting Guy Burgess in his seedy flat in Moscow in An Englishman Abroad, pauses by a bookshelf (oh, those bookshelves!) obviously baffled by most of its contents and even more so by Burgess’s questions about Harold Nicolson, Cyril ...”

“... contemporary London, with Nina Hamnett and Co, and a mandatory but notably unrevealing section on Burgess and Maclean. Two sections are, however, outstanding: on the landowner and painter Dick Wyndham and the connoisseur-collector Sir Robert Abdy. Wyndham, a man who found relief from his various tensions in the variety and depths of his friendships, comes ...”

“... I had homesickness.’ Had she perhaps kept a diary? ‘Of course.’ And here it is. Life with Alan has not been Eva Haraszti’s only life. She was 55 when, in 1978, she left Budapest to come to London as A.J.P. Taylor’s third wife: she was a widow, a scholar, and the mother of two grown-up sons. Her diary reports on the time she has spent as an amateur ...”

“... of agents in a way that’s never been proved of Blunt. What counted though, against Blunt, and Burgess too, was that they weren’t journo-friendly. Journalists look after their own and Philby masqueraded as a devil-may-care drunken newspaperman and so was treated more indulgently by those in his profession. Blunt, who was an austere homosexual, a Marxist ...”

“... so still seems contemporary. The most startling revelation is that it includes a character called Alan Bennet (sic) who is described as ‘in his late forties. He is neatly dressed but there is an indefinable quality of failure about him’.Coward’s play was staged in September 1960, a month after Beyond the Fringe, and a year after I had appeared on the ...”

“... three who fell down on the job (the diplomats who failed to rumble Hitler) or those who, like Guy Burgess, simply did something the influence of which on events is ‘too profound to ignore’. So much for the word ‘Great’. The word ‘Britons’ is also strained by the inclusion of, for example, Gandhi, Smuts and De Valera. The subtitle ‘20th-century ...”

“... It takes me a time to realise that she is not talking about her treasured copies of Anthony Burgess but her social security books.12 March. Names of the Albanian Football Team.The Interpreter: Ilir Agolli.The Manager: Shyqri Rrelli.The Goalkeeper: Blendi Nallbani.2 April. Hotel Terminus, Marcel Ophuls’s documentary on Klaus Barbie, includes an account ...”

“... Lowells (d. 1977, with the Collected Poems coming next year) are a good buy; stock in Anthony Burgess (d. 1993) should probably be held for a year or two; Borgeses (d. 1986) will surge once the editing and republishing are sorted out; James Merrills (d. 1995) should be sold now and rebought later; Becketts (d. 1989) look a little iffy (though would-be ...”

“... 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, ...”

“... and whom I have in the past both in print and in interviews taken care to distinguish from Burgess, Blunt and their associates. Cold-hearted, devious and supposedly a good chap, Philby has never appealed to me any more than Graham Greene does, who was his friend and admirer. It’s ironical that even after his departure for Moscow Philby was always ...”

“... the overt international Communist organisation of the inter-war years. He correctly identifies Burgess as the recruiting sergeant and equally correctly surmises that while all were convinced Communists, for Burgess (and probably for Blunt) recruitment began as a hilarious undergraduate spree. After all, as young men, all ...”

“... and Archbishop McQuaid’s poison pen, but makes a considerable satirical success of the scene. ‘Alan C. Breeze had returned from England with a set of false teeth, which he claimed to have belonged to T.S. Eliot.’ The better to bite her with, no doubt. A married woman, she then went off to London, which owned a little Dublin of its own as far as hard ...”