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“... of emotion,’ Vernon recalls of his friendship with Jesus. ‘My buddy, who once did the best David Letterman impression you ever saw, has been abducted by glandular acids.’ (Compare Richard Tull’s lament in The Information that, at 45, he no longer ‘snags on the DNA’. Amis is being literary; but Vernon is not supposed to be a writer.) For all the ...”

“... the house in his wheelchair. As they drive off, Clune says: ‘His wheelchair did look real nice, though. It was brand new, practically. It had the red leather armrests. I bet he wouldn’t feel too bad if he did have to wheel himself to the store.’ He also writes about his theory of addiction, in which the colour white takes on several meanings. As ...”

“... Thatcher. Work is the only escape, which fortunately moves along a little.9 May. My birthday. A nice woman in a leopardskin coat who always speaks wishes me a happy birthday. I say that I wish it was. ‘Why? What’s happened?’ ‘Last Thursday. The election.’ ‘Oh, you don’t want to worry about that. They’re all the same.’ At which point (we ...”

“... thanks to propaganda campaigns spearheaded by Bullingdon Club toffs like Boris Johnson and David Cameron, underwent significant revision. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the horse path alongside the Regent’s Canal was mud, and forbidden to pedestrians and cyclists alike, I rode to my gardening job in Limehouse on a market wreck bought for ...”

“... There were other papers, sometimes cheap and nasty; and the most famous paper of all had been nice to Hitler at the time of Munich. But the press was part of the fabric of a free society. It was held in trust for us all. The truth was rather different. Scott had acquired the Manchester Guardian in 1907 and henceforth it was ‘carried on as a public ...”

“... draped Art Deco dryads, fishbowl lights and heavy velvet curtains. The set was screaming for a David Lynch remake of The Masque of the Red Death. Room Three, Hotel Esperance, Finistère: a beacon of hope at the end of a darkening continent. But something embedded layers deep, mephitic and beyond redemption, was present in this city. All the coded signs ...”

“... tough keeping track of all the debutantes promenading into print and creating a stir: Donna Tartt, David Leavitt, Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Nancy Lemann, Susan Minot, Mary Robison, Anderson Ferrell – a cast of dozens. Many of those rookies trained at the literary dojo of the author, editor, creative writing teacher and guru-mentor-mindgamer ...”

“... Water Eaton were of ‘good working-class stock, but unintelligent. The sort of people who are nice to you when you come canvassing, but who will not buy a copy of the Daily Worker as they “already get the Herald, thank you very much.”’ Later a great mythologiser of her own social status, implying an ‘Anglo-Irish’ ascendancy background which she ...”

“... have to hold my breath for fear of infecting the people who come near me.’ A view shared by David Gascoyne (with whom she was briefly in love, she nearly 40, he not yet 20), who wrote: ‘On the whole, I think her influence on the people she comes in contact with is bad ... There are very few who can stand the dazzling (but how depressing!) light of ...”

“... life are tellingly invoked. Then there is an amazingly learned search for the sources of David’s Oath of the Horatii. The trail leads through Gluck, Garrick, the ballet-master Noverre, Lavoisier, Beaumarchais and (less of a displaced person now, than when Wind was writing in 1941) Salieri. It is nard to imagine a reader with any developed interest ...”

“... mother of Solomon, and finally as J, mistress of the sublime and the uncanny as well as of King David. In this new book Bloom cheerfully accepts the reviewer’s proposal. That the author of what eventually became the Torah should have been the relict of the unlucky Uriah, and not an Israelite, but a Hittite, was plainly irresistible. Henceforth, he ...”

“... in with Skin Deep, a kind of commonplace book with the quotations left unattributed, much like David Shields’s polemic Reality Hunger, though Shields is not here; Ander Monson, David Markson, Ben Friedlander and other recent authors of detourned or bricolaged ‘new essays’ aren’t included either – too ...”

“... getting less rare by the day, but rare nevertheless. In conveying a sense of the adult politician, David Mendell’s book is surprisingly good. Mendell can’t write as well as Obama, but he’s a reasonably honest, capable and diligent reporter for the Chicago Tribune and takes his assignment seriously. What’s most interesting about the book is that Mendell ...”

“... to visit the animals: ‘Meet your brothers, take them to your hearts and respect them.’ But as David Hancocks colourfully describes, most precursors of the modern zoo have been the opposite of this, from the circuses of Rome to the travelling menageries of the 18th and 19th centuries, shuttered in so that passers-by got no free view; and as he says (and I ...”

“... Who shall paint the chameleon, who can tether a broomstick?’ wrote J.M. Keynes of David Lloyd George in 1919. ‘How can I convey to the reader ... any just impression of this extraordinary figure of our time, this syren, this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity?’ This passage was left out of the original text of The Economic Consequences of the Peace, because Keynes felt that he had tried and failed to do justice to the British prime minister’s baffling complexity of character ...”