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“... abound. Dead Men’s Morris (1936) – reissued in the ‘Classic Collection’ marking Michael Joseph’s 50th anniversary – is quite untypically straightforward and subdued, though it isn’t without moments of ebullience. One of these occurs when the elderly detective, needing assistance to get her nephew Carey out of a predicament in the ...”

“... on the American romance to Henry James on Nathaniel Hawthorne to Lionel Trilling and Richard Chase staking out the ground for American exceptionalism in the postwar United States, the problem for the writer of American fiction famously posed itself as a deficit: ‘no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong’ (Ellison quoting ...”

“... After about the mid-Thirties, children’s papers turned rather more demotic in tone (‘ “Chase me round the gas works, it’s Inspector Meadows,” muttered Alf excitedly’) – while girls, by and large, continued to get the better of boys only by means of some tongue-in-cheek method such as flattery, and boys were still being initiated into the ...”

“... rest of us sat in the kitchen biting our nails and covering our ears as my father, upstairs, gave Michael the beating of his life for that. Another time, the whole family had to sit in front of a children’s panel. That’s what happens in Scotland if a child under 16 commits an offence: the social work department calls in the whole family in an effort to ...”

“... affectionately calls ‘Violet’). Ali and Yda are soon catapulted into an increasingly frantic chase after Will, which lightens the fervid sections emanating from his faltering consciousness. This narrative, which takes up half of the book, has its advantages: Wray makes full use of long dialogue sections to explain Will’s difficult family history, the ...”

“... but that’s because we have a monarchy which is not only a religion but a popular cult: it’s Michael Jackson as well as Runcie. The younger royals instinctively understand that they are a sort of super pop-star, and, while they may occasionally complain about it, the fact is that, as any pop star must, they court tabloid attention, are indeed largely ...”

“... US banks would in theory be enough to break every bank in America (including household names like Chase Manhattan and Citibank) if the debts were evenly spread among them and had to be formally recognised as lost. And the fact is that they are lost, at least in the sense that nobody expects them to be repaid when due – or in the foreseeable future. The ...”

“... so far as I have one, is as an awkward, independent ideas man who can always be relied upon to chase an idea further than is convenient. Of what is this extreme unction reminding me? The slavish gleam of loyalty in the eye, the wish to be first with assurances, the eager glint of the spectacles, the unstoppable self-regard in the guise of self-deprecation ...”

“... as much. Sure enough, in November 2000, the month after the Human Rights Act came into effect, Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones arrived in the Court of Appeal, seeking to hold the emergency injunction granted to them and to OK! magazine to stop OK!’s rival Hello! from publishing unauthorised photographs of the Douglases’ wedding in New ...”

“... rewrote,’ is the epigraph for Bidart’s introduction. I can’t imagine the blizzard of a paper-chase required of Lowell and Bidart; it was something that as a student I wasn’t willing to contemplate. If all three versions of Notebook had been incorporated, it would have put maybe another five hundred pages on the book, and probably required a second ...”

“... at Brighton. That bomb outrage will have done Forsyth’s novel no harm. Whatever else, the chase scenes of The Fourth Protocol drag the reader along at an invigorating gallop. By contrast, Vladimir Volkoff’s The Set-Up is a ponderous affair. The plots of the two novels are exactly similar: both deal with fiendishly deep-laid Soviet conspiracies to ...”

“... indeed her ‘feeling of tenderness’ for Hughes, and her ‘shame at my complicity in the chase that has made his life a torment’. On another level, the taxi driver and his silent wife and child become accusing symbols of another story.At the heart of the book, Malcolm comes face to face with Jacqueline Rose, whose critical book on Plath outraged ...”

“... A British astronaut would have stuck in a flag and said: “I name this moon Elizabeth.”’ And Michael Collins – the Apollo 11 astronaut left behind orbiting in the command module – was the first of several Apollonians who suggested eventually sending a ‘priest, poet or philosopher’: ‘From these people you might get a much better feeling of what ...”

“... Polish Meals for Everyone’. And there’s the optional thrill of a fine-yourself chase in a little red car. ‘You’ve been caught on camera – Your photo for £1.’ It’s time to leave the unbroken set with its traces of blitz and blight, workhouse and limelight, and to present myself for the screening at the London College of ...”

“... of two steel blocks each by Richard Serra (for obvious reasons neither will be moved anytime soon).Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic at the New York Times, calls the new design ‘smart, surgical, sprawling and slightly soulless’. I would take ‘slightly soulless’ over ‘aggressively spectacular’, and given the political controversies visited on ...”