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“... No novelist can bring off a committee meeting with quite the flourish and high style of Robertson Davies. So it is good to report that his latest novel, The Lyre of Orpheus, opens (the theatrical metaphor is appropriate) upon a meeting in a Canadian city, presumably Toronto, of the board of the Cornish Foundation. They are gathered to decide whether they should subsidise a project which Arthur Cornish characterises as ‘crackbrained’ and ‘absurd’, adding that it ‘could prove incalculably expensive, and violates every dictate of financial prudence’, after which he recommends that, in view of all these disadvantages, they should, of course, vote to go ahead with it ...”

“... of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies.’ Jack Matthews’s collection of stories, Ghostly Populations, contributes to the study of these questions; an earlier collection was entitled Dubious Persuasions. Matthews also contributes, as does Peter Taylor, to an ...”

“... a pylon, a purple sky. An invitation to an invisible art manifestation: Lost Memories by Emma Matthews. ‘Very elegant, very Paul Klee,’ the punters say. Rusting English metal, from somewhere down the A13, near Rainham Marshes, rendered as a grid of delicately balanced reds and pinks, with just enough green to cancel the headache. This, so often, is ...”

“... Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, was not exaggerating when he told the Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, that the murders were ‘unique in the history of our country’. They were not the first serial sex crimes, but the first media(ted) serial sex crimes. They influenced Wedekind, Berg and Brecht, and have provided a staple film subject since Marie ...”

“... themselves accept no confinements. ‘Old Boys, Old Girls’ concerns the hopeless life of Caesar Matthews, who is convicted of murder and sent to a tough prison in Lorton, Virginia, just outside DC. There, he is taught to bully and dominate; Jones’s depiction of prison life is full of calmly vicious detail, and his narrative voice mimics Caesar’s ...”

“... the time, The Franklin Papers, whose plot anticipates The Turner Diaries. Both novels derive from Jack London’s ‘revolutionary’s memoir’, The Iron Heel. National Vanguard Books currently offers in its catalogue an edition of The Iron Heel, impudently described as ‘London’s version of The Turner Diaries’. London was, it’s explained, ‘a ...”

“... Have​ you ever experienced the love of an animal? Jack, my family’s golden retriever, put on an admirable show of adoring all of us, but we knew his deepest attachment was to my mother, on whose lap he liked to lie, having his silky ears stroked as he slept. Jasper, the ill-advised beagle that followed, loved no one but himself ...”

“... on a show of busy inwardness. Sometimes the effect is that of being taken past a whole series of Jack-in-the-boxes, unsurprising, shot, and wobbling a little sadly on their long springs. ‘As for Wallace, he had once again transformed himself,’ we read, or ‘It was Jane who had telephoned her uncle with the news of his sister’s death.’ Amazingly, it ...”

“... and apprentices, this is done by crediting them with the chivalric virtues. But in Deloney’s Jack of Newbury the King has to accept Jack as a king in his own domain, and comes to recognise that ‘the welfare of the Commonwealth of Ants is more important to England’s wellbeing than the ambitious wars of the Prince of ...”

“... of the shooting of George Cornell, who had called Ronnie Kray a fat pouf, and of the murder of Jack the Hat by Reggie Kray, assisted by his cousin, Ronnie Hart (‘who had joined the firm when he came out of the army and was a good-looking guy’). The mysterious ‘Albert’ was shot in the foot by Reggie Kray but became ‘Reggie’s right-hand man ...”

“... profiling’. Douglas is the FBI man who inspired Thomas Harris to invent the character Jack Crawford in the Hannibal Lecter novels, so he should know. This is the psychological portrait Brussel came up with of the Mad Bomber: He’s symmetrically built … neither fat nor skinny … a co-operative worker … punctual and neatly dressed … a ...”

“... just a few per cent of children received the most popular names for girls or boys – Olivia and Jack – and the top ten now includes the names of barely 10 rather than 80 per cent of newborns. In many modern classrooms most children will be identifiable by their first name alone. Boys’ names remain less susceptible to fashion – ...”

“... though the latter continued to dominate, she believes – was a likeable character; and George Matthews (still active today) seemed, as he did to everyone, a man full of ‘earnest honesty’. The Party set up in 1920 was designed to be ready for immediate action. Its modes of speech might suggest that it was already on a war footing; this persisted long ...”

“... as ‘the Assyrian’ in his letters. He liked nicknames. Sir John Simon was ‘the Impeccable’. Jack Seeley ‘the Arch Colonel’. Montagu’s suit was hampered by a proviso of his father’s will: he would forfeit most of his inheritance if he married a gentile. In the end Venetia was ‘converted’. They were married in July 1915 – to Asquith’s ...”

“... was a fishmonger. In the early 1920s he had had an offer from a friend in the film industry, Jack Hyams, to become a partner. Had he accepted he’d have owned a large share in Gaumont-British, but he hadn’t been prepared to take the risk of moving into unknown territory. Within his familiar trade he had done reasonably well in a modest way, owning two ...”