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“... is the best measure, they found that 77.3 per cent of those questioned thought reading ‘can be more exciting than watching a film’, 81.8 per cent thought it could be more exciting than TV and, ‘staggeringly’, 23.7 per cent thought it ‘can be more exciting than sex’. You could ...”

“... him a good 50 years younger than Wilson – and it’s not straightforwardly a novel, either. More a set of notes. Wilson appears to subscribe to the unorthodox ‘tell don’t show’ school of fiction-writing. Raff’s cousin, for example, is introduced as ‘a strikingly pretty blonde but something of an airhead whose principal interest was boys and ...”

“... could be treated with a simple course of antibiotics. But the pharmaceutical industry is a more interesting, more morally ambiguous subject than, say, the arms trade – with which it’s explicitly compared in the film – because its side effects include treating disease, easing pain and preserving life, and no ...”

“... And it’s all disturbingly free. Although the internet has spread around the world, it’s used more intensively in some places than others. One of Zook’s useful maps shows that more than 35 per cent of the population of North America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan use the internet, but the figure for ...”

“... shrine: here are great names, great subjects, not examination-notes. The Village Press offers more than sixty books by and about J. C. Powys and his brothers – and there is much more to come, numerous letters to collect. That word ‘village’ links rural Britain, Vole country, with Greenwich Village. So does ...”

“... Eagar​ made his career taking photographs of cricketers, though when he started out in London more than fifty years ago his subjects were mainly party people. In 1966, he took a picture with his Leica of someone he’d never heard of: Oskar Schindler. ‘It is not an exciting shot,’ he once said. ‘But it exists. It is just about the only photograph I ...”

“... the new experimental philosophers should rely only on their own reason and experience. Sir Thomas Browne declared that ‘a powerfull enemy unto knowledge’ was ‘confident adherence unto any Authority, or resignation of our judgments upon the testimony of any Age or Author whatsoever’; and Robert Boyle ruled that it was ‘improper’ to ‘urge ...”

“... them one last time. The ‘irony’ of which, as Burrell would say (the only words that he misuses more often are ‘surreal’ and ‘enormity’), is that he’s a die-hard monarchist, as he reveals in his memoir, A Royal Duty (Michael Joseph, £17.99), a book at once agonisingly boring and shamefully fascinating. Much the most interesting bits are the ...”

“... from Potsdamer Platz’). But the seven songs on Blackstar add up to a record as complete as, and more coherent than, Station to Station or Low. When, three days after it came out, the news broke that Bowie was dead, 18 months after being diagnosed with cancer, Blackstar suddenly turned into something else, not his latest record but his last. He hadn’t been ...”

“... you, would I, you stupid, lanky FUCK.’ He gave up on me after that, and went looking for someone more amenable. Far more disturbing than the disaffected wastrels loitering on our streets, who probably wouldn’t spend their time trying to cadge booze off strangers if they were given the opportunity of something better to ...”

“... shades vigilantly or solicitously hovering over their shoulders as they write. The biographer of Thomas Carlyle is supervised more severely than most: the irritable, brooding Scotsman, the would-be redeemer, and, failing that, the scourge of Victorian England, seems to breathe flame down his neck. To write about Carlyle ...”

“... himself as a leader in the way that his contemporary Ramsay MacDonald did. He thought of himself more as a representative than a politician, and as Brown’s biography shows, it’s striking how certain he was that he expressed the views of those he represented and on whose behalf he fought: children and the unemployed mainly. An ‘agitator for ...”

“... own childhood. It often does. The comic war in Pantagruel is set in Utopia – Rabelais knew his Thomas More and borrowed from him both the thirsty Dipsodes and the obscure Amaurotes. In Gargantua he fits the rivalries between France and the Holy Roman Empire into the tiny world of castle, wood and ford which could be seen from the windows of his ...”

“... the Germans fought a war to assert theirs – or so many German intellectuals felt in August 1914. Thomas Mann’s contribution to this eruption of nationalist self-consciousness was delivered in a series of essays written over the following four years, and it is among the strangest things he ever wrote. Not the least paradox of this exacting, ambitious and ...”

“... the maskers seem to improvise witty or pathetic dialogue, according to an agreed storyline. D.M. Thomas remarks that he is indebted to Germaine Greer for supplying him with information about the tradition of the improvisatrici in Italy: he has constructed Swallow (‘the second,’ he says, ‘in a series of improvisational novels’) in the form of a story ...”