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“... Jean Genet’s flirtation with radical politics began with his discovery – or was it entombment? – by Sartre. It is recorded that when Genet first read Saint Genet, he was cast into deep despair, an emotion shared by many others who have tried to read Sartre’s massive study. But being a practical man he was not one to reject attention. What is extraordinary about Genet’s career is not the extent to which the sage of the Deux Magots left his mark on the subsequent work of this most individual of French writers, but the extent to which Genet managed to struggle free of his mentor ...”

“... descriptive detail agitates the imagination as Dr Lasson’s rather flat story-telling does not. Nigel Williams, who won the Somerset Maugham Award for Fiction in 1978, has produced a second novel, which shows plenty of talent but is rather a mess. Its hero, Jack Warliss, a writer of sorts, invents a series of aliases for himself as he struggles to find ...”

“... you will not need to be reminded of the significance of the date at the head of the narrative in Nigel Williams’s Star Turn: 13 February 1945. The narrator of Williams’s third novel is an ex-journalist, now a Ministry of Information man and amateur cynic (he does not believe the early reports of the ...”

“... portrayed in a more seedily charming and futile way than in The British Museum is falling down. Nigel Williams’s Witchcraft opens with a scene in the British Library (as it now is) which neatly defines what the great British institution stands for in the late 1980s: namely, the enemy, a redoubt for Thatcher’s bureaucrat henchmen. Jamie ...”

“... and intemperate’ attack on the Regius Professor’s Oxford Book of English Verse. In Nigel Williams’s film about Q and the Leavises recently shown by the BBC under the improbable title The Last Romantics, Leavis is seen being greeted with roars of student laughter when saying, during a lecture, that the Oxford Book ‘is a collection of ...”

“... helping, what they need’s a double helping, as at their heels those hounds of time are yelping. Nigel Williams is on even dodgier ground with his ‘Extracts from The Good Doctor – A Comedy’, which is (presumably) motivated by anger about current attitudes towards the NHS. I may be missing a very clever point, but the mixture of glibness and ...”

“... Henry Farr is – or, as it turns out, is not – the ‘Wimbledon Poisoner’ of Nigel Williams’s title. He is a Pooterish solicitor, middling and muddling his way through life; the plot concerns his repeated farcical failure to murder his awful wife, bumping off (he thinks) other innocent people instead. Then, as the plot unravels and a real poisoner shows his hand, Henry discovers that his wife is not so awful after all ...”

“... Skill had been killing Formula One. In the early Nineties, Frank Williams and Renault had together been producing cars that were superior to the rest. The superior drivers wanted to be in them. Williams made more money, and their cars got better. The result was increasingly predictable processions round the circuits ...”

“... fight another day. This was a very courageous decision to make, and there are still those – like Nigel Nicolson – who hold that it was too great a risk to take at such a critical moment. One can imagine, therefore, Montgomery’s relief when, four days after giving out his new orders for Alam Halfa, Ultra provided conclusive evidence that Rommel ...”

“... and a penchant for titles like ‘Blow Jobs’ – her legoeuvre, if you will. The Misfortunes of Nigel shares with Richard Rayner’s novel a loose, picaresque structure and a highly resistible main character. Like Rayner’s Headingley, Nigel Hughes is an arrant chauvinist who fancies himself a Lotharian hero, the ...”

“... Dangers of Deterrence, published in 1983 with the same editors. Both were designed, according to Nigel Blake and Kay Pole, to rescue a debate in which issues were being ‘extremely badly handled’ either because, though philosophical in nature, they were not being treated as such, or because, though they were recognised as philosophical, the treatment was ...”

“... when his admired opponent in the go-karts was the British driver Terry Fullerton. No mention of Nigel Mansell or Niki Lauda or Michael Schumacher. Still less of Alain Prost. All Senna ever wanted, in this perspective, was to drive cars fast. Politics and fame were for other people; or perhaps just a cross he had to bear. He was fond of calling on God to ...”

“... The peaceable whale is the least cute and most awesome of our fellow animals, and Heathcote Williams rises to his subject with a volume which is not only a picture-book of the whale, and an anthology of human observations of the creature and its meaning for us, but is held together by his long poem which lists, in a Whitmanesque way, the utterly ...”

“... exceeding its outlay on the Falklands War. After the strike ended, the Tory chancellor, Nigel Lawson, described it as ‘a very good investment’.The miners returned to work in March 1985; a thousand had been sacked during the strike, often after being arrested on picket lines. The fate of these men anticipated that of their workmates. Although the ...”

“... periodical articles, by no means all of which deserve his, or anybody else’s, attention. Nigel Smith, Marvell’s new editor, remarks that the serious annotation of Marvell’s works began only in 1927, with H.M. Margoliouth’s Oxford edition. That edition might never have been projected but for Eliot’s 1921 essay on the poet, itself the ...”