Beer, Dame Gillian, 143–4
Beer, Patricia, 47, 48; Collected Poems, 48
belief, 6, 8; see also humanism; morals; religion
Belsey, Professor Catherine, 157–8
Belstead, Lord, 40
Bennett, Alan: Talking Heads, 52
Bennett, Paul, 143
Benson, E. F.: Mapp and Lucia, 42
Bernard, Tristan, 55–6
Betti, Ugo, 8
Bierce, Ambrose: The Devil’s Dictionary, 145
Big Brother, 60
Biggers, Earl Derr, 34; The House Without a Key, 34
biography, 124–6
Birrell, Dr (translator), 62
Blair, Tony, 60, 122–3, 159
Blake, William, 57; ‘Jerusalem’, 133; ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, 131
Blincoe, Nicholas, 129
books, 15, 33, 47–8, 70, 78, 130, 148, 158; bad, 5–6, 10, 78–9
Borges, Jorge Luis, 156
Bowen, Elizabeth: The House in Paris, 83
Boyle, Charles: ‘Literals’, 111
Boyle, Edward, Baron Boyle of Handsworth, 77
Bradbury, Malcolm, 154; Doctor Criminale, 154
Brecht, Bertolt, 117; ‘Deliver the Goods’, 12; ‘Hymn to God’, 52; Journals, 83
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 52
British Board of Film Classification, 79
British Council, 84, 157–9;
Literature Matters (newsletter), 157–9
Broadcasting Standards Commission, 146
Broccoli, Alberto R. ‘Cubby’, 91
Brodsky, Joseph, 125, 148;
‘Letter to Horace’, 44
Brombert, Victor: Trains of Thought, 118–19
Brontë, Charlotte and Emily, 61
Brooke, Rupert, 126; ‘Peace’, 132
Browne, Sir Thomas, 111
Browning, Robert, 106
BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), 31
Buchan, Claire, 32, 33
Buchan, Toby, 141–2
Budapest Gypsy Symphony Orchestra, 7
Burchfield, R. W., 35, 40; The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, 110, 147
Burgess, Anthony: Earthly Powers, 4
Bush, George W. (and Bushisms), 59, 135, 159
butler, Liverpudlian, in Amsterdam, 159–60
Butler, Samuel, 10, 11, 52
Byatt, A. S.: The Biographer’s Tale, 147
Byron, George Gordon, Lord: from Hours of Idleness, translation of Hadrian’s address to the soul, 98
Cambridge University, 13–14, 144; see also Downing College
Camus, Albert, 71
Čapek, Karl: R.U.R., 100
Carcanet Press, 76
Carlyle, Jane, 23
Carlyle, Thomas, 23
censorship vs. freedom of expression, 84–5, 123
Chambers Twenty-First Century Dictionary, 147
charitable donations, requests for, 13–14, 33, 87, 93, 109, 143–5
Chateaubriand, François
Auguste René, vicomte de, 86
Chatto & Windus, 11, 76, 108, 162
Cheadle, the Vicar of, 133–4
Chesterton, G. K.: ‘The Ballad of the White Horse’, 124
Chin P’ing Mei (The Golden Lotus), 62
China and the Chinese: writings, 14–15, 15, 62, 129, 130; zombies, 16
Church of England Newspaper, The, 59
Cicero, 106; De Divinatione, 113
Clark, General Wesley, 53
Cleese, John, 14
Climbié, Victoria, 151
Clinton, Bill, 5
Cockburn, Claud: I, Claud, 34
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 28, 29–30, 61, 63, 106, 108;
‘The Ancient Mariner’, 28–9; Notebooks (on Milton), 30, 119
Collins, Billy: ‘The History Teacher’, 16
computers, 4, 23, 36–7, 110, 112, 143; computer games, 87, 108–9; see also virtual reality
Conquest, Robert, 130–1
Cook, Robin, 110
Cornhill Direct, 161–2
Coronation Street, 7
Cotton, Charles Caleb: Lacon, 75
Cowper, William, 25–7; ‘Light Shining Out of Darkness’, 54; ‘The Needless Alarm’, 5; ‘The Negro’s Complaint’, 26–7
Crabbe, George: The Newspaper, 31, 32
culture, 157, 161; ministers of, 2, 87, 122; types of, 2–3; see also morals; Zeitgeist
Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society, The, 2
D., Sister, of the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus, Singapore, 121
Daily Express, the, 150
Daily Mirror, the, 150
Daily Telegraph, the, 5, 74, 155
Damien, Father, 133
Dante Alighieri, 54
Davenport-Hines, Richard, 133
Dawkins, Richard: River Out of Eden, 121
Day Lewis, Cecil, 78
death, 1, 5, 9, 20, 21, 21–2, 22, 111–12, 112, 138–9, 145; and life, 5, 9, 30
Desire Direct (online magazine), 19
Dickens, Charles, 128; Hard Times, 143; A Tale of Two Cities, 60–1
Dickinson, Emily, 8
doctors, see medical profession
Dorking Council, gaffe, 7
Downing College, 14; see also Cambridge University
Drabble, Margaret, 18
dreams, 33, 43, 44, 45, 81, 112–13, 136, 139–42, 150, 156, 162–3; in Paradise Lost, 119–21, 164–5
Dresdner RCM, 40
drugs, 66–8; drug culture, 2
Dubus, André: Dancing After Hours, 3–4
Duncan Smith, Iain, 2
EastEnders, 7, 89–90, 122
Eco, Umberto, 54
Economist, The, 99
Egerton, Colonel Clement, 62
ego, the, 26; see also ‘moi’
electronic typewriter, 35–7
Eliot, T. S., 46, 140, 156, 157, 163; ‘Four Quartets’, 156;
‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, 156; Selected Essays, 131–2; The Waste Land, 106, 131
Eliot, George, 61; Middlemarch, 15
Elizabeth II, HM the Queen, 146
Ellis, David, 126
Enright, D. J., passim; 169;
childhood, 31, 38, 51; and Downing College food, 10; horoscope, 7, 83, 102, 152; Wandsworth Social Services report, 164; see also dreams works cited or quoted: A Faust Book, 18; ‘Beyond belief’, 88; ‘Half Price Memory: PC ad’, 37; ‘Let us have medicos’, 137; Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor, 122; The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse, 115; The Oxford Book of Death, 59, 93; Play Resumed, 33; Signs and Wonders, 59; The Terrible Shears, 101
Enright, George, 20
Enright, Grace, 78, 101
Enright, June, 20
Enright, Madeleine, 82, 162, 166, 167; and apple tree, 165
Eric, 138
Esther, 109 euphemisms, 21, 36, 147, 166; and dysphemisms, 163–4; see also language
Evening Standard, the, 15
Ewart, Gavin, 8, 166
faith, see belief
Farb, Peter, 34, 34–5; Word Play, 34
Fitzgerald, Penelope: ‘The Axe’, 21; The Blue Flower, 65
Flaubert, Gustave, 42;
Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues, 143
Fleming, Ann, 147
Fleming, Ian, 147
foot-and-mouth disease, 95–6
football, 151; see also David
Beckham
Fowler, H. W., 147; see also R.
W. Burchfield
Freud, Sigmund, 44 (‘Ziggy’), 78
Full Monty, The, 34
gaffes, 7, 106, 126, 147–8, 162
Gaitskell, Hugh, 147
Gale Research Inc., 1, 161
Genesis, 54–5
Gide, André, 51
Ginzburg, Natalia, 41
Gladys, 93
God, incidental references to, 52, 53, 54, 69, 99, 121, 132, 150; see also religion
‘God’s Total Quality Management Questionnaire’, 24–5
Goethe, Johann Wolfgan
g von, 1, 30, 31, 62, 72, 92, 117–18, 128, 129, 148; The Diary, 117–18; Elective Affinities, 118; Faust, 118; Roman Elegies, 117–18; The Sorrows of Young Werther, 116; Wilhelm Meister, 65
Golden Legend, The, 19
Goncourt brothers, 42
grammar, 17–18, 33, 34, 36, 40–1, 104–5, 149; see also hyphens; language; words
Green, Henry, 56, 57
Greene, Graham, 100
Gross, John: A Double Thread, 89; The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, 42
Guardian, the, 58, 150
‘Gwendolen’, 42
Hadaway, Harry, 40
Hamburger, Michael, 27
Hampstead and Highgate Express, the, 3
Hardy, Thomas, 106
Harris, Professor Roy, 110
Harris, Thomas: Hannibal, 73–4, 150
Harsdörffer, Georg Philipp, 55
Haverty, Anne: The Far Side of a Kiss, 13
Hawkes, David, 62–3
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 140
Hazlitt, William, on Coleridge: 29; ‘On Disagreeable People’, 13; Liber Amoris: The New Pygmalion, 12–13
heaven, hell and purgatory, 85–6; see also Christopher Marlowe
Hecht, Anthony, 68, 68–9; ‘Green: An Epistle’, 68
Heine, Heinrich, 117; ‘Die Loreley’, 162
Heller, Erich, 116
Herodotus, 55, 66–7, 90
Hervey, James: Meditations among the Tombs, 29
Hilton, Tim: John Ruskin: The Later Tears, 146
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 70
Hoggart, Paul, 17
Hoggart, Richard, 70, 87–8, 100; Between Two Worlds, 37; The Uses of Literacy, 87
Holmes, Richard: Coleridge: Darker Reflections 1804–1834, 62
Holtby, Winifred, South Riding, 18
Hopkins, Gerard Manley: ‘My own heart let me more have pity on’, 69
hospitals, 21, 111, 136; experiences in, 4, 41–2, 43–4, 93–4, 96–7, 106, 107–8, 112, 137–8, 166–9;
Bolingbroke Hospital, 43;
Royal Marsden, 167–8; St
George’s, 43, 93, 138, 166, 168
Howard, Philip, 57
Howarth, Herbert, 156
Hoy, Philip, 68
humanism, 8, 153; see also morals
Hume, David, 6; ‘On the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature’, 6
hygiene for SM practitioners, 74
hyphens, 110–11
identities, 83–4, 98; mistaken, lost, stolen or misspelt, 4, 23, 84, 109–10, 144, 151–2, 167, 168; see also soul
ill health and illness, 4–5, 21, 22, 23, 43–4, 90, 107, 111, 136, 143, 145
inaccuracies, 147–8, 155–6, 161–2; see also gaffes; spelling; words
Independent, the, 60, 150
Independent on Sunday, the, 23–4, 148
Ingrams, Richard, 40
irony, 30, 46
James, Clive, 41
James, Henry, 61
James, William, 6, 74
Jandl, Ernst: ‘nichts und etwas’, 27
Japan, 98, 155–6; fatal wartime misinterpretation?, 34–5
Japan Experiences: Fifty Years, One Hundred Views, 155–6
Jay, Sir Antony, 143
Jenkins, Hilary, 157–9
Johnson, Samuel, 38, 111; The Idler, 63; The Rambler, 63–4
Josefina, 75
Joyce, James: Portrait of the Artist, 11
Kafka, Franz, 33
Kermode, Sir Frank, 47
Killick, John, 165
King, Francis, 155–6
Kipling, Rudyard, 78; Kim, 144
Klima, Ivan: Between Security and Insecurity, 84
Knights, L. C., 97
knowledge, 30, 153
Kohl, Helmut, 106
Kraus, Karl, 31, 37, 79, 111
Krebs, Sir John, 40
Kristeva, Julia: New Maladies of the Soul, 99
Lambeth Conference, 1998, 8–9
Lampson, Parisoula, 149
Lanchester, John: The Debt to Pleasure, 17
language, 55, 136, 154–5;
Coleridge on, 29; first, 54–6; of junk mail, medical warnings, press, reviews, etc., 20–21, 23, 24–5, 38–9, 45–6, 46, 53–4, 56, 65, 73–4, 86, 91–2, 103–4, 135, 145, 150, 151–2, 164; see also personal advertisements; press; words
languages, 114–5
Larkin, Philip, 156–7
Last of the Summer Wine, The, 162–3
Lawrence, D. H., 126
Leach, Christopher, 45
Leamington Spa Observer, 151
Leavis, F. R., 14, 61, 97, 155
Leavis, Q. D., 10, 61; Dickens the Novelist, 61; Fiction and the Reading Public, 61
Lee Kuan Yew, 122
Leeds University, 77
Lessing, Doris, 122
Levi, Primo, 40–1, 44
Lewinsky, Monica, 5, 23
Lewis, Jeremy, 76, 166; Kindred Spirits, 76–7
Lewis, Petra, 136
Leys, Simon (Pierre Ryckmans), 125; The Angel and the Octopus, 149
Li Yü (or Li Houzhu), 129
Lispector, Clarice, 83; The Hour of the Star, 70–1
Literary Guide to London, 147
literature, see writers and writing
London Library, 1
London Magazine, 56
London Review of Books, the, 80, 87, 125, 133, 154
London Underground, 151
Lowell, Robert, 131
Luke, David, 117–18
Lurie, Alison: Real People, 39
McCartney, Paul, 155
McGough, Roger, 155
McGown, Jill: Redemption, 79
McNally, Terrence: Corpus Christi, 92
Maitland, F. W., 14
Mandelson, Peter, 5
mankind, 6; see also humanism, morals
Mann, Thomas, 128; Doktor Faustus, 3
Marlowe, Christopher: The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, 85
Marvell, Andrew: ‘A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body’, 44
Marx, Groucho, 52
Maturin, Charles Robert: Bertram, or The Castle of St Aldobran, 29
May, Derwent: Critical Times: The History of the Times Literary Supplement, 105
medical profession, 3, 22, 93, 107, 167; joking with, 7, 97
Millennium Dome, the, 151
Millay, Edna St Vincent, 106
Mills & Boon, 148
Milosz, Czeslaw: ‘Preface’, 27–8; ‘A Silenced Zone’, 156
Milton, John, 30, 54, 122; Lycidas, 106; Paradise Lost, 15, 119–21
‘moi’, the, 68–70, 98, 107, 155; DJE’s, 70, 72–3, 107
money, 73, 124; making, 14, 101; from writing, 10, 11
Monroe, Marilyn, 116
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 28, 85, 101, 107, 112, 113, 148–9; on the human condition, 111; ‘On the vanity of words’, 17
Montefiore, Janet, 11
morals, 6, 31, 127, 166
Morning Post, the, 29
Mowlam, Dr Mo (Marjorie), 60, 61
Mslexia magazine, 48–9
Mugnier, the Abbé, 86
Murdoch, Iris, 76
Murray, John: A Gentleman Publisher’s Commonplace Book, 110
Musil, Robert, 3, 98; ‘Literary Remains in my Lifetime’, 71; The Man Without Qualities, 3, 18–19, 43, 92, 142, 165
Nabokov, Vladimir, 105
Nagel, Thomas, 30–1; Mortal Questions, 22
Naipaul, Sir Vidia, 122
National Health Service, 2, 41–2, 42, 74, 90, 97
New Puritans, the, 126–9, 130
New Testament, Tyndale vs. Authorized Version, 82
New York Review of Books, the, 126
newspapers and other media, 31, 32, 88, 100, 124, 148, 168 see also press, television
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 37, 69, 74, 98, 103
Nightingale, Florence, 133
Nilsen, Dennis, 49
Nisbet, Robert: Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary, 102–3
Nunn, Trevor
, 14
Observer, the, 150 old-fartism, 42–3, 92, 166; see also past, the glorious …
Oldie, The, 86, 151–2, 163
Oliphant, Margaret, 23, 61
Orczy, Baroness: The Scarlet Pimpernel, 57
Orwell, George (Eric Blair), 50
Owen, Wilfred: Preface, 123–4
Oxford University Press, 2, 41, 61–2, 66, 76
P., Dr G. (DJE’s GP), 106–7
Paeonians and Perinthians, 90–1
painting, 62
Paris Review, the, 56
Parris, Matthew, 60
Pascal, Blaise, 30, 53, 62, 69, 71; Pensées, 68, 71
past, the glorious, and inglorious present, 42–3, 72, 113–14, 165, 166; see also old-fartism
personal advertisements, 23–4, 79–81, 126
philistinism, 123; see also money; Zeitgeist
pidgin English, 34
Plath, Sylvia, 115–16, 116, 150
Play (The Times), 65
PN Review 138, 165
poetry, 1, 27–8, 29, 62, 63, 116, 121, 127, 129–31, 135, 157
political correctness, absurdities of, 113–14, 147
Pomponius Atticus, 112
Pope, Alexander, 16, 42
Pope, the: John Paul II, 85
pornography, 19–20, 49, 79, 84, 124
postmodernism, 16–17, 72, 147, 155, 159
Prayer Mat of Flesh, The (The Before Midnight Scholar), 130 press, the, language of, 2, 5; see also language; newspapers
Prévert, Jacques: Paroles, 88
Proust, Marcel, 16, 86; À la recherche du temps perdu, 31, 83, 149, 162–3
Pujam, André, 91
Radio Times, the, 56
Reich-Ranicki, Marcel, 63
religion, 5, 71, 135, 142–3, 161;
the Christian Church, 133–4, 135
Richardson, Samuel: Pamela, 12
rights, right and wrong, of people and animals, 48–50
Rossetti, Christina, 19; Time Flies: A Reading Diary, 19
Rowling, J. K.: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, 99
Ruskin, John, 146
Saddam Hussein, 149
Sade, Donatien Alphonse François, comte de, 132–3
St Aubin de Terán, Lisa, 75
Saint Paul, 19
Santayana, George, 44
Scannell, Vernon, 56, 57, 59–60; Feminine Endings, 116
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 141
Scrutiny, 144
Scupham, Peter, 112
self, the, see ‘moi’
Selzer, Richard, 139
sex, 113–14, 142, 148, 149, 150
Shakespeare, William, 37–8, 92; Antony and Cleopatra, 121; Hamlet, 32, 166; King Lear, 44; Macbeth, 63–4; Richard II, 123
Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein, 12
Showalter, Elaine, 154–5
Sima Qian (Ssu-ma Ch’ien), 14–15, 167; Historical Records, 14
Simms, Jacqueline, 62
Singapore, 48, 77, 121, 122
Sisson, C. H.: ‘Easter’, 51;
‘Looking at Old Note-Books’, 1; ‘The Mirabel Sea’, 35