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“... he issued a public declaration against the continuation of the war. But much more striking is Billy Prior, who advances stealthily through the trilogy, beginning as a mute casualty and ending as its central and most articulate character. His sexuality ambiguous, his attitude towards the authority of generals, doctors and civilians by turns contemptuous ...”

“... at the Government: ‘Who was he? This representative of all those lost voices. To give him a name would name the rest.’ The method is familiar from Ondaatje’s earlier work. Though the story of Anil and Sailor could be the basis for a detective story or political thriller, he’s more interested in epiphanies, in ...”

“... footprints’ like the AT&T tower ‘were not just advertisements’, explained Billy Payne, chairman of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games: they showcased ‘state-of-the-art technology’ that ‘people will be seeing for the first time’. The Coca-Cola Corporation built its Olympic City entertainment centre at the northern edge ...”

“... film – apart from Jack Nicholson’s masterly cameo – is how unpleasant the Hopper character, Billy (think Billy the Kid), is from start to finish. His plain nastiness in almost all situations, including those that warrant none, is actually a bit of a relief played against Fonda’s beatific and self-righteous Wyatt ...”

“... urged the Viking Press to publish it, since he admired Kennedy’s other Albany novels, Legs and Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game: both these books have now been re-published as Penguin paperbacks.* The first is about the Albany gangster, Jack ‘Legs’ Diamond; the second is about a poker-player and pool hustler called ...”

“... and the captive witness to many of Rake’s many murders, is a girl called Meg Allen. (As her last name suggests, Meg also appears in Hystopia’s frame story, as the wayward sister of Eugene.) Meg is a freckled teenager, not a combat veteran, but the mental breakdown she suffered after her boyfriend, Billy-T, died in ...”

“... amiable mother and abused by a drunken stockbroker stepfather, Jock (Ms Bargate likes a meaningful name). Grown up, she is seduced and bullied into a septic abortion by her timid, clap-ridden fiancé Tim. He changes his mind, but too late: Sadie is sterile. Tim, now a selfish husband, knows this, but lets the ignorant heroine attend the infertility clinic for ...”

“... they create a network of defining possibilities along which characters can advance. Of course (in Billy Bathgate) a bright-eyed boy juggling on street corners in the Bronx in the 1930s is going to be noticed by the passing gangster boss Dutch Schultz and get drawn into his orbit; of course (in The Book of Daniel) the son of a Communist couple sent to the ...”

“... of America. From the solemn, marmoreal repose of statues to the Newark motel bearing Lincoln’s name and image, Tice’s camera pans across the culture, sometimes inflected through the lens of a sociologist, sometimes an anthropologist or student of urban design, sometimes a homespun surrealist. But the place with which he is most familiar and understands ...”

“... may be scarcely bearable: the filth (mala) on the acarya Hemacandra brought his sect the honorary name of Maladharin. We find such things in the Cheyasutta Mahanisiha, whose Salluddharana explains contrition and confession; and whose Kammavivagavivarana 2 The boxer imposes 100 per cent will punching harm into harm in sadistic rhythms. He’s called Alan Boum ...”

“... the legends of America’s Old West enjoyed with the dime novelists who turned William Bonney into Billy the Kid. In fact he has already been the subject of almost as many films as Billy the Kid and inspired nearly as many books. Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy have both written novels about him; my biography of him appeared in ...”

“... lose.’ Chisum, in which John Wayne played a godlike rancher, was Hollywood’s first serious Billy the Kid movie since Arthur Penn’s 1956 adaptation of Gore Vidal’s Left-Handed Gun. Although much concerned with issues of law and order, it is not quite an establishment Western. In it, Billy is (initially) among the ...”

“... David Hughes even devises a comic genesis, involving Bunter, for Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Billy Bunter? ‘Bunter,’ states Hughes’s narrator firmly at the start of the novel, ‘was a character in a schoolboy paper called the Magnet. He came on the scene in 1908 when he was 14 and vanished from it, having added not a year to his age, when the ...”

“... and otherwise, have helped to further the adventures of James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, Jeeves, Billy Bunter and Charles Pooter; not forgetting, from an earlier age, Flashman and Rochester’s mad wife. In a class of their own come the surrogate writers who are authorised to enrich the leftovers of a dead storyteller. The late, prolific Alistair MacLean ...”

“... I’m not the brains behind this,’ she said. ‘But I tell you one thing. They got rid of Billy Wright. That was a big mistake.’Wright was a terrifying figure, a prolific sectarian killer who rejected the loyalist ceasefires and set up his own paramilitary group which played a prominent role at Drumcree and continued to kill Catholics. In December ...”