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“... This book is ostensibly about six literary figures with whom Norman Podhoretz, for 35 years the editor-in-chief of Commentary, was closely involved from the early Fifties until the early Seventies: Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Hannah Arendt, Lillian Hellman and Norman Mailer ...”

“... my non-location of which has now been irritating me for weeks. From a little blue book, about a Norman baron dying. I only remember bits, and probably misremember those: In his chamber, weak and dying, Was a Norman baron lying … I couldn’t find this in Scott (school prize), nor in Kipling’s Collected Verse. I have ...”

“... and Basildon to write inevitably self-congratulatory entries. No doubt he would have invited Norman Foster to provide one for Stansted. Pevsner’s own six or eight-week journey around the county was made slightly less uncomfortable than it might have been, and even more economical, by the use of a caravan, loaned by his eccentric editor at the ...”

“... them; in 1918, Britain used mustard gas against Germany and dropped gas bombs in support of the White forces against the Red Army the following year. In 1925 the Geneva Protocol was signed prohibiting the use of chemical weapons in war, but without banning production and stockpiling. By then, the Soviet chemical weapons programme was in full swing: the ...”

“... Norman Rush’s first novel, Mating (1991), is narrated by an unnamed 32-year-old female doctoral student in nutritional anthropology. It takes the cherished theme of a brilliant and independent woman’s search for a male partner worthy of her, and transplants it to a utopian matriarchal community in Botswana. For a man to recast Pride and Prejudice as a modern, feminist love affair, and then to set it in Africa, is a bold move, and neither the book’s reworking of the conventions of first-person narrative nor its relentlessly artificial language seem to owe anything to Rush’s immediate predecessors or contemporaries ...”

“... like trying to make this film.’ Getting to work on the film, wresting it from the hands of the white director Norman Jewison, persuading Warner Brothers that it needed to be as long as it is, that the scenes of Malcolm’s pilgrimage to Egypt and Mecca had to be shot on location, all this is a version of Malcolm’s ...”

“... over two hundred pages, with more than a hundred colour plates, as well as a series of black and white portrait photographs of the artists taken by Johnnie Shand Kydd. It has five catalogue essays, several pages of artists’ biographies, a bibliography and, as the very last item in the book, a six-page checklist of the 110 works in the exhibition, with an ...”

“... round their penises. He looks like a sales rep, come to show them a new line in tupperware. But Norman Lewis has always maintained a low profile when it comes to exploring. His admirable series of travel books and travel novels, informative, neatly written, and full of a dry detached humour, make Lawrence of Arabia or Bruce Chatwin, even Wilfred Thesiger ...”

“... his back to her, sticking a label on a book, the only seeming borrower a thin ginger-haired boy in white overalls crouched in the aisle reading. Neither of them took any notice of the new arrival, so she coughed and said, ‘I’m sorry about this awful racket,’ whereupon the driver got up so suddenly he banged his head on the Reference section and the boy ...”

“... Not unlike Les Diaboliques (which was quite as disturbing) in several ways, Psycho was a black and white, low-budget horror movie which for cheapness – in both senses – was filmed by a television crew, while being directed by the A-listed Alfred Hitchcock, by then responsible for huge and glossy Hollywood hits like Rebecca, To Catch a Thief and North by ...”

“... all​ the 19th-century innovations disparaged by Eric Hobsbawm as ‘invented traditions’, the white wedding must rank alongside clan tartans as the most enduring, a convention now so firmly rooted that many people think it’s medieval. To the Georgians a white wedding was a foreign novelty. In 1818 a British traveller ...”

“... are interesting or, for that matter, beautiful. Most castles, for instance, are ugly; almost all Norman buildings, especially Norman cathedrals, are large and little else. The aesthetics of Heritage History come into play here. Caernarvon Castle is an imperial monstrosity; the nave of Durham Cathedral is colonial brutalism ...”

“... whenever possible, actual books and ideas, that help explain the mysterious novels and stories. Norman Sherry famously does this in Conrad’s Eastern World and Conrad’s Western World, remarkable works of sleuthing rediscovery that respectively cover Conrad’s Indian and Pacific Ocean voyages, and his wanderings in Africa, Europe and Latin America. But ...”

“... Right from the start of his itinerary Cobb gaily mixes everything together. He paints well-behaved Norman children such as one can only dream of meeting these days. He rides his biography backwards, he describes his period as a pion (a supervisor) in boarding-schools run either by priests or by anti-clericals, both of whom were great believers in corporal ...”