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“... literary agency – The Author’s Empty Purse, published in l968 – with the same quotation that Graham Watson uses to conclude his reminiscences of a lifetime spent in the profession: This is the age of the middleman. He is generally a parasite. He always flourishes. I have been forced to give him some little attention lately in my particular ...”

“... my shock, as a 15-year-old, on learning that the Captain of my house, the immensely talented Paul Graham-Watson, had been killed by guerrilla forces in the Malayan jungle, that my friend George Ponsonby had been killed in an armoured-car accident in BAOR, and that Tony Pugh and Nick Wadham had been killed flying with the ...”

“... there were plenty of people in the English faculties of universities quite as clever as Crick and Watson – but Crick and Watson had something to be clever about. For the last thirty years or so ambitious literary exegetes have lacked precisely this – something to be clever about. Commentary and interpretation of the ...”

“... to die ‘when cruel old campaigners win safe through’. Epitaphs apart, what will survive of Graham Greene? Not love, certainly; nor the famously tortured guerrilla of Roman Catholicism, fighting and writing for and against the Church from inside and outside it, and all the more effective a partisan and publicist on its behalf when he seemed most ...”

“... since overtaken by Bacon and Freud. Craxton still sits with John Minton, Michael Ayrton, Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash as a Neo-Romantic painter, part of the postwar reawakening of the national landscape tradition of Blake and Palmer. In 1987 an influential exhibition at the Barbican, A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain ...”

“... have been so lucratively pursued by the Italians. He may not even have lasted in the England team. Graham Taylor, though, was always a Platt fan, and Platt owes a lot to Taylor. One of the most strenuous sections of Platt’s book is devoted to repairing Taylor’s reputation: a forlorn task, but rather touching to behold. Taylor, we learn, is ‘one of the ...”

“... everyone. Here’s Waugh’s description of the Horizon office: ‘horrible pictures collected by Watson [Peter Watson, financial backer of Horizon] & Lys & Miss Brownell working away with a dictionary translating some rot from the French’. Here’s his summing up of Sonia marrying Orwell (Waugh and Mitford’s nickname ...”

“... Me. There is, nonetheless, a remarkable similarity in technique between, say, Margaret Drabble and Graham Greene. Both create an entirely coherent romance world, powered by variations on self-satisfaction, in Greene’s case masquerading as self-disgust. In both cases this is highly transmissible to the reader. Every decade has its own style of ...”

“... student from Sparta [who] was a truly magnificent farter’. Beyond him he does not venture. Julia Watson stops with the old man of Blackheath who sat on his set of false teeth. Calamity and the gruesome, the crude and the slapstick, are given a suitable amount of space, and Harry Graham is perhaps overworked, though ...”

“... solution to the problem of intergenerational genetic transfer’, is courted by the prestigious Watson-Crick Institute, otherwise known as Asperger’s U.; Jimmy barely scrapes into Martha Graham Academy, a third-rate arts college. Like all the other students there, he knows he is an irrelevant loser. Anyone with a ...”

“... would certainly plagiarise The Great Tradition. He was indignant and suspicious when he heard that Graham Hough was writing a book on D.H. Lawrence, whom he himself had so recently and definitively dealt with. Hough must be up to something. In fact Hough, who had a perfect right to produce a book on Lawrence if he felt like it, was a good hater himself, in ...”

“... Vane, and no one else is likely to. In his book Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century, Graham Robb made a strong case that the granddaddy of them all, Poe’s Dupin, is coded as homosexual. Offering a dry précis of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, he writes: ‘There is, of course, nothing essentially odd about the passionate, secretive and ...”

“... habit of sending comp copies to anyone who might be interested. Kathy Acker, Gaston Bachelard, Graham Greene, Karl Popper: all responded appreciatively on receiving a Gaberbocchus in the post. Admirers were as likely to be eminently establishment as anti-establishment. Jean Dubuffet invited the Themersons for tea in Provence; the philosopher Elizabeth ...”

“... later, Freud cut the Spender poems out of the book, ‘deeming them superfluous’.) Peter Watson, who funded Horizon, also began to enjoy Freud’s company. ‘He helped me very much, looked at my pictures and bought things and gave me money and books,’ Freud said. ‘He had pictures that I liked and learned from, very good things … He had a ...”

“... his famous parts – Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, Leo in The Go-Between, Carlyon in the film of Graham Greene’s The Man Within, the ventriloquist Maxwell Frere in Dead of Night, Jack Worthing in The Importance of Being Earnest – tended to make a dark festival out of the business of being everything but the one thing specified. Trust is an actor’s ...”