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“... pretensions in the ray cast by death’), and so did the labours of his assiduous biographer, Desmond Graham, who now brings us this thorough but often rather dull selection of Douglas’s letters. In 1974, the anniversary of Douglas’s death was marked far more lavishly than anyone could have easily predicted thirty years before: there was ...”

“... anguish makes the English landscape seem Inhuman as the jungle, and unreal Its peace. I’m sorry Desmond Graham didn’t include any of these in his recent Poetry of the Second World War, because, uniquely among Gascoyne’s work, they evoke not only his characteristically archetype-ridden Shelleyan psychodrama but that particular historical moment of ...”

“... has become one of the accepted literary commodities. The shadow of Stephen Dedalus lies heavy on Desmond Hogan’s The Leaves on Grey. It is the story of Sean the narrator and his friend Liam, first as boys in Galway, then, in the central portion of the book, as students in Dublin in the 1950s, and finally, almost as a dutiful afterthought, in Derry in the ...”

“... write that: ‘It was a journey that ought not to have been made; it had broken my life in two.’ Graham Greene, surviving a feverish night in the Liberian interior, records a comparable epiphany: ‘I had discovered in myself a passionate interest in living. I had always assumed before, as a matter of course, that death was desirable.’ Between Theroux’s ...”

“... and The Polyglots and taste a sort of comprehensive ur-flavour of the inter-war novel, from Graham Greene to Henry Green. And yet his words and sentences, unlike theirs, are never quite in place, never quite add up to a novelist’s ‘world’, the sort that has a good chance of standing outside time. But Gerhardie had an absolutely natural sense of ...”

“... poets he must have known that he was asking for trouble. Trouble duly came in the shape of Sir Desmond MacCarthy, who doggedly stood up in the Sunday Times for the quality of Tennyson’s mind, deplored Auden’s account of the great man as ‘very patronising’, then sought to out-patronise him in turn: ‘It reads as if Mr Auden had been feeling while ...”

“... also given an important stimulus by the urgings of Keynes’s iconoclastic friend, the economist Graham Hutton. The fact that the early Statesman had no fixed party abode may have helped its fortunes at least as much as it harmed them. At the start, the Webbs, Shaw, Sharp and most contributors held firmly to the view that the Parliamentary Labour Party had ...”

“... Somerset Maugham’s own failure in organising a network. The spy-master has been degraded by Graham Greene into a shabby down-at-heel anonymous creature who will identify an innocent colleague with the mole he is hunting and kill the wrong man. For him Philby and Co are the modern equivalents of heroic Jesuit priests plotting against Elizabeth. In Le ...”

“... and devoted acolyte who went to Yale with Bush’s daughter Barbara); a freelance editor, Sean Desmond; the staff at Crown Publishing (who reportedly paid $7 million for the book); a team of a dozen researchers; and scores of ‘trusted friends’. Foucault: ‘What difference does it make who is speaking?’ ‘The mark of the writer is … nothing more ...”

“... have been to that initial success. Ramsey, Busby, Shankly, Revie, Stein, Clough, Robson, Dalglish, Graham, now Ferguson, and possibly Wenger too: the careers of the great managers, like those of politicians, tend to end in tragedy, or at least in bitter disappointment, as they cling on for too long. Mourinho believes not only that he belongs in that list by ...”

“... envisages England bombed back into the stone age. In The Collapse of Homo Sapiens (1923) Anderson Graham has Britain pulverised by African and Asian bombers whose technological superiority is reviled as the fruit of the deluded British universities that accepted foreign students. The same racist fantasies are displayed in ...”