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“... were awkwardly placed in mid-Victorian Kensington. Their friends included the ageing Radical John Bright and Elizabeth Gaskell’s widower, William. But smart society was closed to them and this was something that Beatrix’s mother, Helen, seems to have minded deeply. A grim-faced little woman, she apparently occupied herself entirely with a round of ...”

“... pressed, when Draco Malfoy has what can only be described as an epiphany. He’s standing at the foot of his bed, hand poised to drop a newly bought textbook in the trunk with the rest of his school supplies, when it hits him, like lightning, like a hex, like Granger’s slap in third year …*I became an addict when I was 14. But it wasn’t drugs, or ...”

“... order’ – illegal enemy combatants – said by the former deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo (the author of two of the infamous legal memoranda on the legitimacy of torture) to be, yes, equivalent to pirates. We are back at the door wherein we came. It might be thought remarkable that a scholarly book, published as the US administration, in the ...”

“... like J.R. Ackerley’s father, or a conman like Tobias Wolff’s, or a bullying drunk like John Burnside’s, or a cold fish with a secret past like Germaine Greer’s, but a man with a hearing disability who tried to do the best by his family and whose one attempt at corporal punishment – a boot up his son’s backside – didn’t connect. With so ...”

“... with yellow window frames.‘The border runs down the middle of the river – there’s a crow’s foot carved on the stone on the bridge exactly where it is,’ Johnston said. Decades of Irish weather have worn it almost away but he traced it for me with his finger. Big trucks hurtled by – this is a short cut from south Donegal to Belfast and the boats to ...”

“... Aquitaine, who is appointed abbess of a remote and failing convent. But where Matrix is fleet of foot, even glancing, skipping past whole decades of its protagonist’s life, The Vaster Wilds is close to the ground: every dirt clod, passing thought, night terror, flash of fever and aching muscle is registered. Groff has framed the two novels as the first ...”

“... of the future. Any decent cyberpunk library would include the novels of Sterling, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley and Lewis Shiner, along with the anthology Mirroshades, the casebook Storming the Reality Studio, and a growing number of academic studies like Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity. Bukatman pays extensive tribute to Gibson’s seminal role as he ...”

“... have cruised down the Lea Valley from Lippitt’s Hill Camp at High Beach, a base right beside John Clare’s Epping Forest asylum, and they’ll be back again tomorrow. Sukhdev Sandhu, who flew with the sky cops for his book Night Haunts, called the experience ‘the panoptic sublime’. The machines cost half a million pounds each, a sum that pays for a ...”

“... No American writer​ ever revealed more in a photograph than Joan Didion. She was small, five foot one and three-quarter inches tall, which she fudged on her California driver’s licence as five two. She weighed nothing. Somewhere there must be a photograph of her beaming with delight but I’ve never seen it. With age, her neck thinned ...”

“... at all between knowing you want to pee and then just peeing. I was at Plimpton’s funeral in St John the Divine not long ago, and they sat me near the front, you know. Suddenly, I had to go. I knew I wasn’t gonna make it all the way down the aisle so I spotted a little side door and I got the canes and nipped in there. Halfway down the corridor, I was ...”

“... childhood in West London, Merchant Taylors’ School, history and modern languages at St John’s College, Oxford, then an MBA at Insead. In 1997 he and Ian Wace launched the hedge fund Marshall Wace, with $50 million of seed capital raised from friends, family and George Soros. It now manages $69 billion in assets. Like many hedge fund ...”

“... to Tariq Ali. Before my dismissal, I appeared on television to defend the paper against A.J. Ayer, John Gross and Colin Welch – with a chairman who accused me of being a disciple of Sorel, a writer of whom I had barely heard. (David Caute sardonically notes that ‘the allusion to Sorel was standard nonsense among professors of history and politics hostile ...”

“... a Manifesto that was described as ‘the longest suicide note in history’ and shot itself with Foot. Then, it got just 28 per cent. But even in 1987, with party political videos to remind the nation that Young Upwardly-Mobile Kinnocks – ‘Yuk-kies’, Jenkins can’t resist suggesting – had displaced the wild-eyed patricians, it got only 32. Neil ...”

“... all my farewells failed, I gave up and shut the door in his face, only to find that he had his foot wedged in the frame.’ ‘And shut the door in his face’, like ‘and toss it’ above, gives the sentence a turn after the misleading ‘gave up’, a wry curl in the deadpan expression. She gives up, not resistance, just polite resistance. Such ...”

“... and distinctive achievement. Pinget has been reasonably well served by his English publisher, John Calder, over the years, despite the solecism of choosing the title Recurrent Melody for the almost self-explanatory Passacaille (published in French in 1969 and translated in 1975). In the recent past, however, the pace of Pinget translations seems to have ...”