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“... the novels … as the backbone of a ghost story, I have no patience with it.’ And yet, as Darryl Jones, a specialist in horror fiction at Trinity College, Dublin, points out in his first-rate introduction to this compendium of all James’s ghost stories, the phantoms themselves repeatedly break the rules he has laid down for them. What happens, after ...”

“... Hardy and Tryphena Sparks, Trollope and Kate Field, James and his obscure hurt. So when Monica Jones follows Philip Larkin’ s request by burning his diaries do we feel resentment because the destruction will set an eternal gap between reader and poem? Or is it something lower – frustration at not having served up on some not too distant Sunday the ...”

“... is American schoolkids downloading the Starr report and Penthouse’s free photo-set of ‘Paula Jones – Nude!’ for their civics classes. The press were no exception: they, too, got the computer revolution all wrong. Over the last three years leading British and American newspapers (Times, Telegraph, LA Times) have invested heavily in ‘electronic ...”

“... it does in the case of Meredith and Thackeray. (There is even something self-limiting about Tom Jones as a novel – for the same kind of reason?) As Furbank points out, the novels of Thackeray, Meredith and Trollope frequently take their very form from a social absolute – who is and who isn’t – which must be fundamentally unreal. ‘Evan Harrington ...”

“... form of lawful socialism.’ This complaint over Frei’s victory may be contrasted with John Gunther’s enthusiasm in his reliable Inside Latin America (1967). ‘Chile came close to voting itself Communist in 1964 ... But Frei, who calls himself a Christian humanist, averted this by winning the Presidency against a Marxist candidate after a ...”

“... bore faint traces of the grand manner of the 17th century’, and that the acolyte is evidently St John. All this is a part of the history, the mentalité, of Octave – and so of Yourcenar. These are all fragments peeled from a few dowdy decades in the centuries rolling past Yourcenar’s inward eye. They are so far from everyday conceptions of reality that ...”

“... with proper games. In Stryker’s Run, for example, you controlled a character called Commander John Stryker, who had to convey an urgent top-secret message from one futuristic army base to another. What this meant, in practice, was running along past a monotonous scrolling backdrop of uniform mountains, shooting any enemy soldiers you encountered along the ...”

“... Babylon, a utopian London of the future and elsewhere. It’s a shame that Spufford never read John Masefield’s Box of Delights: I think he’d have liked it; and I’d like to read what he might have to say about it. The Story of the Amulet was number one in a list of the Top Ten Children’s Books of All Time (a silly notion, but appealing ...”

“... being central to any of the novels’ plots as they unfold.Val McDermid has called Herron ‘the John le Carré of our generation’ (a phrase plastered on all the paperback covers) and Herron acknowledged the debt, long before she said that, in the first Slough House book, Slow Horses (2010): one of the characters was given ‘le Carré’s collected ...”

“... racist and sexist prejudices, crowning them with a volley of insults against his former beloved John Major. Evans’s outburst coincided with one from Lord Tebbit, another former MP who made a fortune from privatisation – in his case by joining the board of British Telecom, which as Secretary of State for Industry he had privatised. Tebbit’s target was ...”

“... For the girl has agreed to adoption: the baby is given to the Smiths of Seattle. They name him John, a choice that Alexie uses to signal a well-meaning lack of imagination, and when John Smith grows up, Indian-born but raised by whites, he will become the chief suspect in the search for the Indian Killer. It’s not an ...”

“... has eluded them, and its subject is one of the four or five people who stick in my gullet. John Traill Christie was my headmaster for just over four years. I never knew him well, though I have had to think about him a lot. For a brief period I must have occupied his thoughts because he spent about a term and a half, which coincided with some of ...”

“... concludes his introduction to All What Jazz (1970), a collection of mainly unimpressed reviews of John Coltrane, Miles Davis et al that initially appeared in the Telegraph. ‘Sometimes I imagine them,’ he muses of the readers of his monthly column,sullen fleshy inarticulate men, stockbrokers, sellers of goods, living in thirty-year-old detached houses ...”

“... Later, three legs became two when Harold Wilson and the trade unions’ grandest grandee, Jack Jones, reached the agreement known as the Social Contract, whereby workers agreed to moderate their wage demands so that the two-figure inflation rates could be beaten. Opinion polls decided Jones was the most powerful man in ...”

“... morning. His horse stumbled. He was killed. She knew it before they told her, and never could Sir John Leslie forget, when he ran downstairs the day they buried him, the beauty of the great lady standing by the window to see the hearse depart, nor, when he came back again, how the curtain, heavy, mid-Victorian, plush perhaps, was all crushed together where ...”