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“... helpful in persuading booksellers that here was a book they might risk having on their shelves. Robin Denniston of the Oxford University Press then very generously wrote on the book’s behalf to a number of leading literary editors suggesting that this was a novel worth sending out for review. The book was widely noticed, and liked as well. Reviews helped ...”

“... duchess who thereafter plays a considerable part in their adventures. In The Duchess’s Diary Robin Chapman imagines her to have been an actual person, who had met not the fictitious Quixote but the real Cervantes; and the diary, supposedly translated from the original MS, tells her story. The first book of Don Quixote came out in 1605, the second ...”

“... of Smollett’s footnoting, corrigenda and rambling syntax. This was The Duchess’s Diary by Robin Chapman,3 whom I last saw, many years ago on the Cambridge undergraduate stage, in Jacobean doublet and hose. And now here he is with a Duke Jeronimo. It is as if he has yet to change back – such is his feeling for the ways of 17th-century Spain, for ...”

“... all along withholds more than it reveals. T. S. Eliot maintained: ‘As with Dostoevski and George Chapman, one feels that the action is hardly more than the shadow-play of something taking place on another plane of reality.’ I can’t see any grounds for positing another plane of reality, except the sheer vagueness of what takes place on this one. There are ...”

“... 1980s. They hold their own with more famous photos, taken on and around the Beat scene by Harold Chapman, Fred McDarrah and John Cohen. The photographer Robert Frank is in another league; a dozen prints from The Americans, first published in Paris in 1958 with texts by Beauvoir, Steinbeck, Faulkner and others, hang alongside the Kerouac ms. Frank’s ...”

“... the Spectator, can be explained in terms of his mischievous iconoclasm. But what are we to make of Chapman Pincher, who does not seem to mind the fact that the secret state regarded him as ‘a contact who could be used to plant leaks’. Did Mr Pincher never think of asking himself why the secret state wished to plant these leaks? Or did he know and ...”

“... the magnate, George Walker; once, according to James Morton, an ‘ally’ of Billy Hill and Eddie Chapman, later a frequently puffed adornment of the Thatcherite open market culture.) There is nothing new in the concept, quality tailoring bonded over primal naughtiness. It has been spelled out frequently in the underground literature that shadows the ...”

“... Trinder the longest lived. 1 October. I have just finished reading A Passionate Prodigality by Guy Chapman, one of the books belonging to Francis Hope that I picked up in the summer. From its less than snappy title it would be hard to guess what the book is about and this perhaps explains why, so far as I’m aware, it has no reputation. Originally published ...”

“... danger from the horse-play of the Middle Spirits. Scot remarks that people used to be afraid of Robin Goodfellow (but now they are only afraid of witches, he goes on), and Robin had never been thought a killer. It is rather a hard matter to assess. ‘They laugh and are glad and are terrible,’ says The Immortal ...”

“... genre hack’s best hope of getting into newsprint. There was, for example, fulsome coverage for Robin Cook (Derek Raymond) once he had gone; local colour pieces (memory tapes from the Coach and Horses) outweighing the tepid inches of a life-time’s review space. Cook, that most civilised of men, most troubled of writers, was one of the last to sustain a ...”

“... ground on which to base a prosecution.But it seemed more convincing once the DNA expert James Chapman testified that after a fresh investigation into Nikki’s murder finally began in 2016, an almost complete Y-profile matching Boyd’s was found near the top of her T-shirt and on the right hip area around the waistband of her leggings, and a partial one ...”

“... mentality.’ ‘We just want to save resources,’ said Martin, with a sigh. ‘It’s more of a Robin Hood model – we’re stealing from the corporations. We found a bin today with fifty or sixty cartons of milk inside.’ Everything Alf and Martin own is in the van. They sleep in the back and they don’t have sex with anyone. I asked Alf if there ...”