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“... del Fuego inhabited, as Perec put it in a letter to Maurice Nadeau, ‘by a race of athletes wearing white tracksuits emblazoned with a big black W’. The 99 chapters of his last and longest novel, La Vie mode d’emploi (1978), were arrived at through three interlocking constraints: the planning of a narrative around a cross-section of a Parisian ...”

“... Napoleon than for any other figure except Jesus Christ. Others expressed hope for his return by wearing violets in their lapels – the flower comes out, as Napoleon came back, in March. His name and image remained important to underground movements and, in the immediate aftermath of the Hundred Days, attempts by the new Bourbon government to punish ...”

“... 1%’ signs and shouting at the delegates: ‘Don’t look at me, you might catch poverty.’ David Brooks of the New York Times walked by. He always seemed to be walking by. A man pointed at the ‘Mr 1%’ sign and said: ‘That should be “Mr 0.001%”, thank you.’ They were considering a trip to a strip club to confront delegates about ‘issues ...”

“... Europe, would come to the Zam Zam, sometimes for the martinis but usually to be thrown out. When David Letterman came to town to do a week of shows his advance people phoned Bruno to see if he would throw Letterman out of the bar on the show. ‘No, I’m sorry, thank you,’ Bruno said over the phone. ‘Who’s ...”

“... has reconstructed is only a ‘family romance’, an operetta played out on her own toy stage. And David Lodge’s heroine complains that she is ‘getting dragged into a classic realist text, full of causality and morality. How can I get out of it?’ Trust the contemporary novelist for that, we might think – though, for Lodge’s characters, it’s a close ...”

“... that far country through study and then begin to remember it as their own birthplace. Others, like David Donald and Jeffrey Hart, remember it first and then study it up in order to flesh out their memories with circumstantial detail. In either case, historiography is given the task that Wordsworth assigned to poetry: to reconcile the seemingly unrelated worlds ...”

“... damned at her feet: Marianne Faithfull, the ‘Fabulous Beast’ herself, doing a photo-shoot for David Bailey, ‘sprawling with her legs wide apart, her black satin crotch glinting between her scrawny 55-year-old thighs’. Melvyn Bragg, filming his reaction shots for the South Bank Show, ‘smiling, simpering, giggling, looking down at his ...”

“... someone else back and that’s what neither of them was good at.28 March. Another death, this time David Storey whom I liked and found sympathetic, though I might run into him only occasionally and most often in M&S. It was always cheering, even if these days he was often shuffling as much from the medicines he was taking as from old age. But he would call me ...”

“... gratifying that people die while watching it, round and round for ever, in an endless loop. David Foster Wallace always had trouble finishing his novels. And yet he put in this one a thought so absorbing and delightful that you could easily imagine yourself, like the rat in the experiment, pressing the lever over and over. ‘Thousands of times an ...”

“... On the fourth Sunday in March a group of toughs stood guard at the entrance to the fairground wearing little black and orange St George’s ribbons (denoting the fight against fascism). They weren’t huge guys like the most violent pro-Russian protesters in Kharkiv, some of whom came from a mixed martial arts training centre called Oplot ...”

“... and a peacock called Mirabell, all of it recorded with the help of Merrill’s longtime partner, David Jackson, during twenty years of séances using a Ouija board at their home in Stonington, Connecticut. This volume tips in at 560 pages. Merrill also wrote novels, plays and two memoirs. Born to enormous wealth, he had little to distract him from his ...”

“... wife and small son. ‘Home’ is a pre-fab, decked for the occasion with Union Jacks. The wife is wearing a neat, knee-length utility-model dress. The little boy, in shorts, pullover and tie, looks healthy and well-fed. All three are ecstatic with the happiness of finding each other alive again after a war in which the family at home had been as likely to be ...”

“... post 13 years earlier. He died, aged 82, only six months after I glimpsed him. On the cover of David Ellis’s Memoirs of a Leavisite he is photographed standing with a tree and a bench behind him in (according to the jacket info) the very garden into which he escaped that autumn afternoon. He is wearing the same ...”

“... particular to the portrayal of Vietnamese soldiers as Japanese – as, moreover, the cruel, kepi-wearing, buck-toothed Japanese of John Wayne vintage. Easy to see why any Vietnamese above the age of forty would resent such a vulgar confusion. But musing through a second screening, and seeing Mr Minh’s point afresh, I was struck by the final scene in which ...”