There are some subjects it is almost impossible to believe have never found a novelist. How about Marx’s household? It was a composite of Victorian dramatic stereotypes.

Octopuses frustrate the neat evolutionary division between clever vertebrates and simple-minded invertebrates. Their intelligence is like ours, and utterly unlike ours. Octopuses are the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens.

The only sensible attitude to the Booker is to treat it as posh bingo. It is El Gordo, the Fat One, the sudden jackpot that enriches some plodding Andalusian muleteer.

8. The problems of Albertine are (from the narrator’s point of view) a) lying b) lesbianism, and (from Albertine’s point of view) a) being imprisoned in the narrator’s house.

It would be wrong and unkind to call him a liar, as he has been called: he simply stated his own truths.

What’s that coming over the hill? A white, middle-class Englishman! A Lone Enraptured Male! From Cambridge! Here to boldly go, ‘discovering’, then quelling our harsh and lovely and sometimes difficult land with his civilised lyrical words.

I would, in fact, go so far as to say that Infinite Jest is one of the very few novels for which the phrase ‘not worth the paper it’s written on’ has real meaning in at least an ecological sense; but to resort to such hyperbole would be to fall into the rut that characterises many reviews of this novel.

The story of Gef is both brilliantly silly and irreducibly mysterious. After seven years of research into the legend of the talking mongoose, Josiffe, a librarian at Senate House, is still not entirely clear about the nature of the hoax or who in the family was hoaxing whom. In any case, he leaves open the possibility that Gef lived and talked and ate lean bacon exactly as the Irvings claimed he did.

She sounds, at times, as if a huge crow is about to land on her right shoulder. She breathes the Santa Ana instead of the air. It would be possible to write a parody of her novels called Desert Abortion – in a Car. Possible, but why? The best joke you could make wouldn’t touch her. Not the solidity of what she has done, which can be leaned against like John Wayne.

It is possible to take too many notes; the task of sorting, filing and assimilating them can take for ever, so that nothing gets written. The awful warning is Lord Acton, whose enormous learning never resulted in the great work the world expected of him.

At this point another notion occurred to Mrs O’C.: ‘What sort of radio-station,’ she reasoned to herself, ‘would play Irish songs, deafeningly, in the middle of the night? Songs, just songs, without introduction or comment? And only songs that I know. What radio station would play my songs, and nothing else?’ At this point she wondered: ‘Is the radio in my head?’

The writer destiny has up its sleeve, who cannot be appointed but must messianically recognise himself, will be confident not only that he can provide a plausible solution to the mystery of Edwin Drood but that he has solved the deeper mystery of The Mystery of Edwin Drood – namely, what sort of book it was to be.

Like many professional subversives, Deleuze and Guattari worked well in institutions.

In the countries of the book’s origin, the stories were considered popular trash, and excluded from the canon. In Europe, a similar sense that they had negligible status as literature came about because so many of their early enthusiasts were women.

In listing Rupert Everett’s offences against decency, decorum and respect for his betters, it is hard to know where to start.