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“... intelligent with very sexy legs’. From that out-of-the-body vantage-point he shares with God and Norman Mailer, Isherwood looks down on himself and his friend:Yes, my dears, each of you will find the person you came here to look for – the ideal companion to whom you can reveal yourself totally and yet be loved for what you are, not what you pretend to ...”

“... Cynthia is now out of jail, still lives in Streatham and still gets her housework done by Slave Philip and her garden fixed by Slave Rodney. Her former clients, Bailey says, are ‘waiting in the wings’. Her dream is to open a home for the elderly – men and women: I’d be matron. There would be special wards for the disabled. If people wanted ...”

“... where the Bible and The Joy of Cooking constituted the library. As a boy, I became acquainted with Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal and Truman Capote as talk-show guests. The TV screen was their boxing-ring. Literally so, on occasion, for Mailer, who had studied his Hemingway. Vidal was the sophisticate – dry, erudite, condescending to an America which he ...”

“... one. In traditional narratives, its losses are balanced out by the progress achieved by Norman rule in the formation of state and nation. In England, Flodden doesn’t appear on the list of iconic national military victories, a list that has always privileged success against the French – at Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt – over victories won on ...”

“... The Archers on Radio 4, so I’m out of touch. I read in the papers that Phil Archer, or at least Norman Painting, who played him, died recently, but is Jill still around? Where’s Shula? What’s with Eddie Grundy? Old Walter Gabriel must be long gone, but what happened to his scapegrace son, Nelson? Are the village shop and post office still open, or does ...”

“... force of that passage. She spoke about her ex-friends as if they were research that went wrong. Norman Mailer had been ‘nice’ in the early days but he got above himself and had too many big ideas. To her, he was just a boy rolling at her feet, and she disliked the idea that journalism could be about analysis and penetration, as well as the work of eyes ...”

“... Which is ironic, since one of the most dramatic upheavals in English naming occurred after the Norman Conquest, when parents chose to replace the wonderful and varied names of their grandparents’ generation – Aethelwulf, Aethelflaed, Frithuswith, Ealdred – with less personalised Toms, Dicks and Harrys. It is rather as if an orchestra had been ...”

“... novels Raymond Chandler wrote between 1939 and 1953 featuring the Los Angeles private detective Philip Marlowe, and the best-known film adaptation of any of them, the 1946 movie of the first book, The Big Sleep, have helped to shape the perception of what America was like in the 1940s and early 1950s. The film is dark and menacing – Fredric Jameson writes ...”

“... satire and romantic tragedy. It was such violations of classical decorum that so affronted Philip Sidney and caused him to rail against his contemporaries’ taste for ‘mongrel tragi-comedy’. Shakespeare liked nothing better than to tease or confound his audience’s expectations: he renders the tragic effect of Othello even more cruel by means of ...”

“... but someone decided to add extra pointed drama to the occasion – probably the abbot himself, Philip Ballard alias Hawford (medieval Benedictines tended to acquire a second monastic surname, often the place they had come from). The life of a monastery centres on worship, an intricate performance of chanted services rhythmically punctuating every day of ...”

“... his prescient opening staves: Aficionados of the modern American novel have learned to look to Philip Roth for complex literary constructions that play wittily with narrative voice and frame. One thinks of such Roth works as My Life as a Man and The Counterlife. Now Saul Bellow has demonstrated that among his other well-recognised literary gifts is an ...”

“... began fourteen long years in literary limbo. Her rediscovery came in 1977. Two influential fans, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, named her as their ‘most underrated author’ in the TLS and she was taken up in a flurry of publicity, interviewed on radio and TV. Quartet in Autumn, the novel she had on the stocks, was subsequently shortlisted for the ...”

“... on video by the Commission for Racial Equality. Here, in terms that the likes of Geoffrey Howe and Norman Tebbit found inflammatory, Rushdie revives the ‘two nations’ trope to describe the position of blacks and Asians as ghettoised, second-class citizens within British society. This theme was taken up in The Satanic Verses with its barely noticed ...”

“... leaders and a mere two sentences in the joint communiqué.’ I can shed some light here. The late Philip Williams, when researching his massive biography of Gaitskell, an unparalleled picture of the postwar Labour Party, interviewed Norman Brook, the cabinet secretary who accompanied Attlee to Washington. The ...”

“... in the feminist fight club classic Town Bloody Hall (1979), where, from the audience, she takes Norman Mailer to task for his patronising use of the term ‘lady’ as a prefix – lady writer, lady critic. Even when issuing a rebuke (‘It feels like gallantry to you, but it doesn’t feel right to us’), Sontag keeps her cool in a raucous setting where ...”