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“... of neglect on my part’. My Phantom Husband also has a different translator from Pig Tales – Helen Stevenson rather than Linda Coverdale – and suffers from uncomfortable moments. Translation, like contraception, is better if it is never felt. ‘Who had detained him on the streets of the suburb, which clumsy, garrulous neighbour?’ Bof. Safety ...”

“... at the number of familiar names on the contents page: Barbara Trapido, Anthony Thwaite, Anne Stevenson, Alan Brownjohn, Helen Simpson, Andrew Motion, Michael Hofmann, Alan Sillitoe, Louis de Bernières and Geoff Dyer are ten of them, and ‘new’ isn’t the first word that springs to mind. But there are plenty of ...”

“... most suspicious circumstances, vied with McCarthy in his denunciations of Truman, Acheson, Adlai Stevenson and many others, as the leaders of a Red conspiracy which was seeking to submerge America. On no occasion requiring political courage did President Eisenhower show himself to be courageous. Thomas Reeves, the latest historian of McCarthyism, is very ...”

“... hour-glasses, maps, 17th-century typography, etymologies, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; the other man shares those preferences, but in a boastful way which converts them into the attributes of an actor ... Years ago I tried to free myself from him and moved from mythologies of the slums to games with time and infinity, but those games ...”

“... Wood (1927) was his favourite – and his status as a Scottish monument, a descendant of Scott and Stevenson. There’s nothing fanciful about this – Janet Adam Smith reported that Clement Attlee pointed out to her a borrowing from Kidnapped in The Thirty-Nine Steps – and if he had had a slightly different temperament Buchan might have become a more ...”

“... handed Nixon a $1,000 campaign contribution from his father for the bitter Senate fight against Helen Douglas. No less ironic is the way Nixon, as Vice-President, rushed to visit an apparently dying JFK in hospital in 1954, prompting an effusive letter of thanks from Jackie (‘I don’t think there is anyone in the world he thinks more highly of than he ...”

“... Sisters and defending lesbian fiction. Eliot isn’t a scintillating letter-writer like Keats or Stevenson, but sometimes readers are led back to the poetry from fresh angles – and not least from the ‘cousin of Colonel Heneage’ angle. It’s typical that he remembered Colonel Heneage’s name, because Eliot, so aware of his own family name and ...”

“... the traditional air ‘The Old Head of Dennis’, to which it was set by the Dublin composer John Stevenson. But the words too were responsible for the song’s great appeal: There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet As that vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet; Oh! the last rays of feeling and life must depart, Ere the bloom of that valley shall ...”

“... served on a bed of gravel.) We drank Talisker – the Skye malt, favourite of Robert Louis Stevenson – and tore the strips off some small sachets of tartare sauce while the landlady told us how annoying it was to see Czech incumbents at her local church. Seamus has small tolerance for intolerance, so he drank his whisky, rolled his eyes, and went to ...”