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“... condom left on a sofa, Tracey’s 80-year-old dad in a nearby pub, a dream about ‘how she was a sparrow and I was a bumblebee and she was flying with one wing’. She likes quaffers – in the current book, Shane MacGowan – and scenesters of all professions, the quick brown foxes who understand the game and like to play it: Christopher Hitchens, Michael ...”

“... making a patronising show of it, and stayed to tell a good story about Christopher Hill and John Sparrow, and of how he’d been the unwitting agent of a quarrel between them, while ignoring an ambitious and possessive American professor who kept yelling ‘Eye-zay-ah! Eye-zay-ah!’ from across the room. (‘Yes,’ he murmured at the conclusion ...”

“... habit of infidelity and eventually left his wife for good in 1901, when Lewis was 18; and Augustus John, his celebrated predecessor at the Slade, whom he sought assiduously to emulate, and whose ever-varying seraglio became an object of fascination. But Lewis’s presentation of himself to women, and to the men with whom he conferred about women, had a ...”

“... well-run European city in the dawn of the 21st century.’ Coetzee also uses Costello’s son, John, who often accompanies her, as a foil. He slumps in the auditorium, worrying that his mother is rambling or sermonising. Is this Coetzee protecting himself by pre-empting criticism? The technique of fiction within fiction is much more complicated than the ...”

“... to men, and when he made a promise he kept it.’ In fact, Johnny Depp in his role as Captain Jack Sparrow and Shrek share these qualities, and I’ve no reason to suppose they don’t behave decently in their off-screen life. For vulgarity, you need to go to the much more crumpled and ‘adult’ Mel Gibson or Bruce Willis, both of whom still make movies. So ...”

“... had to back-translate FitzGerald’s quatrains into Persian. Baron Corvo did a version; Augustus John supplied the images for a translation into Romany Welsh. More recently, W.G. Sebald searched out FitzGerald’s grave in the churchyard in the village of Boulge in Suffolk, and, in the same way that FitzGerald chose to speak through Omar Khayyám, Sebald ...”

“... plays cockney wideboys in British gangster flicks. Xan – who shares his surname with Duane Meo, John Self’s ‘whizzkid editor’ in Money – is sardonically described as a ‘Renaissance Man’: he has published a short story collection called Lucozade, and plays rhythm guitar in a Camden café ‘every second Wednesday’. His old man, Mick Meo ...”

“... politics. But what Hutton calls the ‘new model of ancient Celticity’, introduced in 2010 by John Koch and Barry Cunliffe in Celtic from the West, sees the spread of Celtic languages as a consequence of the existence of an Atlantic trade route rather than ‘waves of invasion’. Trade doesn’t necessarily bring peace. Slave shackles have been found at ...”

“... I earnestly recommend it. Schuyler readers have fared rather well since his death, in 1991. Black Sparrow brought out The Diary of James Schuyler in 1996 and the Selected Art Writings in 1998; in 1999 Slow Dancer published as Last Poems those pieces that had been included in the American Collected but not the Selected; and the New York Review of Books ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... legally in the United States, so there was no merit in doing heavy work on the text. When Judge John Woolsey lifted the ban on the book – 6 December 1933 – Bennett Cerf set about issuing a new edition. But the text he gave his printers was a copy of Samuel Roth’s facsimile pirated edition, printed in New York: its errors remained to corrupt Cerf’s ...”

“... spurious plumes ... A similar idealism moves the waitress who, twittering like a little London sparrow, quite ridiculous, quite charming, carries on a flirtation under the sour gaze of her customers.’ I assume that nowadays Dame Rebecca does not talk like this, and that she is not too surprised when people reply civilly to civil questions even when asked ...”

“... reworks ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’:Who said, ‘Peacock Pie’?      The old King to the sparrow:Who said, ‘Crops are ripe’?      Rust to the harrow:Who said, ‘Where sleeps she now?      Where rests she now her head,Bathed in eve’s loveliness’? –      That’s what I said.Who said, ‘Ay, mum’s the word’?      Sexton ...”

“... pattern with Johns. About one fifth of all males in the UK between 1800 and 1850 were christened John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so ...”

“... of change Perplexes monarchs. According to Milton’s early biographer, the Irish republican John Toland, Charles II’s Licenser for the Press regarded these lines as subversive, and wanted to suppress the whole poem. Immediately after the passage in which he imagines God hatching the universe out of the abyss, Milton asks: what in me is dark ...”