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“... not, he emphasises, a matter under his control – of the severely crippled author, the huge sales of the earlier book came as a big surprise both to him and to his publishers. I find this hard to understand. Hawking’s personal history was scarcely mentioned in the book itself, but journalists would scarcely have been likely to overlook it. His ...”

“... to write about detective fiction, Edmund Wilson, in his 1945 essay-review, ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Her writing is of a mawkishness and banality that seem to me literally impossible to read. You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out; and you cannot become interested in the characters, because they never can ...”

“... of the more effective publicity stunts which the author has at his disposal. Yukio Mishima did his sales no end of good by ritually disembowelling himself in front of the world’s press cameras. In a quieter way, it is hard to see how this work could have merited print, had it not been for the interesting failures of Edwards’s life, and their presentation ...”

“... pay money for them, or that they like the thrill of rubbing shoulders with their author. Were the sales of Tristram Shandy not evidence that he and his metropolitan readership deserved each other? How this hawker of his own work would have loved a Bragg interview or a guest appearance at Hay-on-Wye. For the last eight or nine years of his life, from the ...”

“... countryside for the pleasures of London; it was to be found in the Spectator’s portrait of Sir Roger de Coverley; and it reached its apotheosis in Washington Irving’s account of Christmas at Bracebridge Hall in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-20). Irving’s was the first, and by no means the last, American contribution to the ...”

“... ringing: the opposition have just won an election and keep asking how things work. Kalin gives a sales pitch about the personal freedom, privacy and security that come with a citizenship upgrade, but he also claims that what he’s doing isn’t ‘about buying passports; it’s about self-actualising as a global citizen.’ Citizenship by investment is ...”

“... and mores.) Four years later, when the French reclaimed Alsace, it was tit for tat: Alsatians were sales Boches. The fact that some of them had been involved in Wehrmacht atrocities in France didn’t help either.Having been dragged before the local Gestapo for speaking French with his mother, Ungerer was now told by his teachers that before presuming to ...”

“... a couple of months later, in 2011, my first husband, father of my daughter, and my oldest friend, Roger. Then, during the final quarter of 2013, there were two more deaths within a month of each other, neither of them really unexpected after years of frailty, but both, Doris Lessing and her son, Peter, having attachments of some complexity to each other, to ...”

“... Oxford Companion to English Literature, and the names most ubiquitous in The Book History Reader, Roger Chartier and D.F. McKenzie, can be found on none of the new Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism’s several thousand pages. Perhaps this is as it should be; to call book history a theory would be to read it against the grain. For many literary critics ...”

“... be hit hard by public sector cuts. Ray Mallon, Middlesbrough’s elected mayor, has polished his sales pitch until it shines, however uncertainly. Mallon was a detective superintendent in Cleveland Police who became nationally known in the late 1990s as Robocop, when his ‘zero tolerance’ policing caught the attention of Tony Blair: he had promised to ...”

“... And we see him bank-rolling a Psychic Bookshop and stationing his daughter at the till. Few sales were rung up. Content to repeat Conan Doyle’s own roll-calls of the SPR’s most droppable names (Alfred Russel Wallace and William James belonged, and Freud was a corresponding member), Daniel Stashower doesn’t discuss the wider impact of the ...”

“... concise and to the point here: The term ‘outsider art’ was coined by the art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for ‘art brut’ (‘raw art’ or ‘rough art’), a label created by the French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by ...”

“... and work: I was invited to speak about his time at Cambridge. The conference papers, edited by Roger Bowen, have been published, and Dr Bowen has also written an appreciative biography. Japanese studies being his subject, he is well qualified to weigh up the writings on modern Japan of Herbert Norman, a missionary’s son who grew up there. Very different ...”

“... In 1926 she became famous. In the spring of that year she published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a book based on an idea suggested to her independently by her brother-in-law and by Lord Louis Mountbatten and which certainly has claims to be the most ingenious of her novels. At 11 p.m. on Friday 3 December she came downstairs, got into her ...”

“... Three Weeks, both published in 1907, there is an enormous space, whether you estimate it by sales or by quality: but the space is not absolutely vacant. Where, along the line between Glyn and Conrad, do you place The Old Wives’ Tale? Bennett started life a ‘modernist’ and talked about Flaubert, and about Jamesian ‘doing’: yet James, at the end ...”