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“... reason for picking up novels and short stories. But like all pleasurable diversions, it has to be paid for. The practice of narrative has a hard history of moral ambition, and is as much concerned with what people ought to be as with what they are. Writers tend to agree that the two conditions rarely coincide. There ...”

“... accepted Boeing’s tender for a massive new cargo aircraft for the United States Air Force, David Lodge would not have been able to write Paradise News. Instead, however, Lockheed got the contract, and Boeing were left with a redundant set of blueprints for the biggest furniture van never built. To save all that development money going to waste, they ...”

“... directory called Supernatural Visions of the Madonna 1981-91. The desktop publication was heralded by large ads in various papers featuring the visionary. Sister Marie or Sofia Marie Gabriel: her revelations and secrets could save mankind. In the book, the author includes a poem, called ‘Child Mystic Child of Destiny’: I live the life of an innocent child ...”

“... critics could divide literary works into good and bad patches, admiring the first half of a novel by Gautier but not the second, praising everything to do with Goriot in Père Goriot, damning everything to do with Rastignac. He was thinking of Emile Faguet, but we might think of F.R. Leavis performing the same sort of operation on Daniel Deronda. ‘A book is ...”

“... the very concept of analysis, or else the nature of Tippett’s music, which would have to be different from any other music: it would have to lack elements, components, essence – which, I am sure, is the last thing Mr Cole wants to suggest. No, he simply wants to honour vagueness by vagueness. The present ...”

“... London Evening Standard had turned down the editorship of the Times in favour of succeeding Sir David English at the Daily Mail. As a boy, wrote Sir Perry, he had wanted to be editor of the Times more than anything in the world. So when Mr Paul Dacre picked Rothermere’s Daily Mail in preference to Rupert Murdoch’s ...”

“... She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily ...”

“... have replied: ‘My dear – the noise, and the people.’ As good an impression as any that could be devised from (in his case) normal social experience. The fragment of Beowulf known as ‘The Finnsburgh Episode’ provides a standard formula for expressing the shock-horror impact of a surprise attack on a heroic society. The Battle of Maldon is justly ...”

“... Late one evening, leaving a dinner party at the American Embassy, I ran into David Carritt, who told me he had come across a circular bronze relief of the Virgin and Child in use as an ashtray.’ The narrator is Sir John Pope-Hennessy and his nocturnal encounter was with one of the most hawk-eyed art-dealers in Europe ...”

“... what with one thing and another I’ve sometimes felt the same way, on behalf of Mark Frost and David Lynch, about the news environment that accompanied the broadcast of Twin Peaks: The Return. I say ‘on behalf of’ because I imagine that Lynch couldn’t care less. ‘It’s good to kind of go along with your life,’ he told Entertainment Weekly in May ...”

“... Since when the period of neglect ‘has grown shorter each year so that it now seems to be something like a minute. It is no longer possible, or it seems no longer possible, for an important avant-garde artist to go unrecognised.’ Ashbery’s sense of historical change is too tidy, but that doesn’t diminish the importance of his claim: the ...”

“... 2000, was the result of decades of hard-fought campaigning, inside and outside Parliament. By the time he became leader in 1994, Labour had long been committed to enacting legislation that would allow anyone to request information held by public bodies. But far from embracing FOI in office, Blair dragged his ...”

“... representations of the state of the art. In The Satanic Verses the narrator, who may or may not be the Devil, confides that ‘what follows is tragedy. – Or, at least, the echo of tragedy, the full-blooded original being unavailable to modern men and women, so it’s said.– A burlesque for our degraded, imitative times.’ The Lost Father recounts a ...”

“... this is only the beginning of a list. He is saturated in the literary past but unhindered by it, able to adapt a 19th-century manner to subjects the past could not accommodate; he’s hardly unaware of the siren voices of modernism but remains safely tied to the mast. It’s likely that Hollinghurst has encouraged more aspiring novelists than anyone ...”