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“... by the great swordsmith Yasukuni of the Soshu Branch of the Sagami School’). The best that Clive James – a regular visitor and student of Japanese – could come up with was the smirking comedy Brrm! Brrm! Only two novelists have filtered Japanese characters into English with any conviction, and neither of them has made a home in the country: Kazuo ...”

“... the best he could get, in January 1938, was to be appointed Ambassador to the Court of St James. It was a strange appointment, especially given FDR’s inclinations towards intervention and Kennedy’s belief that appeasement was the only way to keep the peace, a view he had held long before he arrived in London. He occasionally consorted with ...”

“... less grandiose American writers have achieved such quiet splendours of chronicle, whether it’s Booth Tarkington in The Magnificent Ambersons describing the ‘little bunty streetcar’ pulled by a mule along a track that wove its way among the cobblestones, whose passengers got out and pushed if the mule strayed from the track, or E.B. White in his essay ...”

“... that a broker-dealer firm could do with an institutional investor’s order was to telephone its booth on the NYSE trading floor, whose staff would in turn page a ‘floor broker’, usually also employed by the firm. After receiving the order at one of the many yellow telephones in the five trading rooms, the broker would walk over to the specialist ...”

“... to promote the Super Furry Animals, is the degree of pupil dilation. Every flash in the photo-booth freezes a ‘Say No to Dope’ warning. Moustache, hair, specs, it makes no difference. Howard is still the traditionalist, the 25 spliffs a day man. Everything up to now has been a scam, why not this autobiography? How, after so many years of abuse, could ...”

“... his readers’ presuppositions make them make him. Yet inside its opacity (exactly as with Henry James) is an unforced emotional directness which it seems a kind of insult not to take straight, as simple truth. On these terms it is hard to understand what this poem is about unless it is written by a poet bitterly angered by having his verse ...”

“... projected eleven-play cycle. ‘I took it as my credo,’ Wilson wrote, ‘and sought to answer James Baldwin’s call for a profound articulation of the Black tradition that could sustain a man once he left his father’s house.’With what he called his ‘anthropological eye’, Wilson set out to dramatise the ‘dazed and dazzling … rapport with ...”

“... I now realise it’s Halloween, though the festive spirit doesn’t extend to the guy in the booth, who is mean-faced, unwelcoming and possibly more pissed off than he usually is because he has had a whole day in the company of this demented barnyard fowl, which is now clucking up and down the waiting line of jaded travellers, all of them as mystified as ...”

“... War England, the Duke of Newcastle recalled that a wealthy Cheshire knight like Sir George Booth had been proud to appear on St George’s Day clad in the livery of the Earl of Shrewsbury; and, on state occasions, the proudest courtier might, like the humblest of grooms, be clad in a costume that signalled the absorption of his identity into the ...”

“... non-fiction, and a dearth of science fiction. But the boy’s antennae were good. At the booth of the Seabury Press (a publishing division of the Episcopalian Church) he spotted four anomalous hardcovers, all by an author with a peculiar name: Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, The Futurological Congress, The Invincible and The Cyberiad. Two – Invincible ...”

“... and green of the hills. This is where you find Tibbie Shiel’s Inn, where the Blackwood’s boys James Hogg and Christopher North used to come to liquefy their rhetoric. We entered from a smirr of rain, snoking for supper. It turned out supper was something that happened in the glen before 6.30 p.m. A lady in a white lab coat emerged to remind us of the ...”

“... a film with the Rothschilds’ money’, because he’d cast Stéphane, the daughter of Baron James-Henri de Rothschild.) On the last day of the shoot, Vercors’s wife returned home early and complained that the German officer had shown more respect for their house than the film crew had. ‘But Madame,’ Melville replied, ‘the German wasn’t making ...”