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“... land, that in itself can make him an aristocrat. The ‘great commoner’ with vast acres like Coke of Norfolk was a particularly English phenomenon. The authors’ aristocracy includes the intellectual aristocracy en bloc, as well as the great families of banking and industry like the Barings and the Guinnesses. It is all right for an aristocrat to be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... before she fled, then sank into a not so creative craziness with the daily help of three grams of coke, thirty beers, an untold amount of tequila, smoothed over with quantities of grass. After a suicide attempt and rehab, Wim Wenders cast him as an emotionally flat but lethally friendly Tom Ripley in The American Friend in 1977, probably his best movie and ...”

“... is a monument to white supremacy. The book and film offer different variations on the theme: the David O. Selznick production replaced Mitchell’s celebration of the Ku-Klux-Klan with a visually unforgettable paean to ‘the cavalier society’ of antebellum Atlanta, with its ‘knights and ladies, masters and slaves’. Atlanta was actually a frontier ...”

“... their departments. The powers are residual for more than one reason. When in 1611 Chief Justice Coke held that ‘the King hath no prerogative but what the law of the land allows him,’ he was echoing what his predecessor Sir John Fortescue had written in the 15th century: the king had no power to alter the law (that was for Parliament) or to administer it ...”

“... conglomerates have had to let it go. The Oxford University Press feel no obligation to keep David Gascoyne’s Collected Poems in print. Faber and Faber get along very nicely on Tom Eliot’s singing and dancing pussy-cats. The Cambridge Festival (don’t tell them) is nowhere, it isn’t happening. What’s the story? Even the participants don’t ...”

“... in the dark subterranean car-park. Under my third-floor balcony a swimming-pool posed for a David Hockney painting, the water the colour of Paul Newman’s eyes, though it was deemed too cold to be usable in ‘winter’. (Appropriately enough, I had met Hockney during my previous visit to LA, through my artist brother. His brother was there ...”

“... patrician of next-century information capitalism, Gates has been talking to everyone, including David Letterman, about what the future – guided by Microsoft, its controlling partner – has in store. With his transformation into a Third Wave Pollyanna, Chairman Bill is sounding remarkably like Speaker Newt, and his new book The Road Ahead has much in ...”

“... Ivy League or the great state universities. So Middleton wasn’t wanting for company. The poet David Wevill was a long-time friend and neighbour. The brilliant Swedish poet and fiction writer Lars Gustafsson turned up in 1974, and kept Christopher both amused and busy translating his poetry into English. John Silber, who later became a reactionary ...”

“... a Hispanisation of ‘pusher’ – then run home and get out the syringes, the lighters and the Coke can bottoms they use to melt the heroin. Four of them split two doses, pressed against each other in Pancho’s bedroom, between the bed and the chest of drawers, in front of hand-tinted, framed family photos: Pancho as a baby, Pancho as a teenager with his ...”

“... Young catches sight of Edwards opening the door of his beat-up Buick and picking up the old Diet Coke can that falls out to dispose of it in the trash. Not only is this a rich man who drives an ordinary car, but someone who deals with his own rubbish rather than leaving it for others to take care of! By the time Young discovers that Edwards has got BMWs and ...”

“... pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous. And it’s four decades since David Bowie – wearing a lot of make-up and very few clothes, grinning through his pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous – released The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. ‘Five years, that’s all we’ve ...”

“... figure in a peaked cap, she looks, as another character says, ‘like a model out of one of those Coke ads, only better’. She is a passionate follower of jazz, either at live gigs, ‘or sitting at home with the headphones on, listening to the likes of David Sanborn or the Yellowjackets’. In this story she disables a ...”

“... of sweetener, ‘shot directly into their bodies – the equivalent of eight hundred cans of Diet Coke a day’. Some of the male rats developed bladder tumours. It was eventually shown – much later – that the tumours were caused not by saccharin as such, but by its sodium content, combined with acid in unusually high concentration in male rat ...”

“... In a few months such claims were moot. Scargill led a mass picket of miners to the Saltley coke depot outside Birmingham, recruited the support of the local engineers’ union and saw the thick blue line of the forces of law and order snap and the cops scamper for higher ground.The Saltley événements and their analogues put an end, at some remove, to ...”