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“... postwar period “self-commodify” in this sense,’ McGurl continues, inviting us to ‘think of Tim O’Brien and his lifelong use of nine months in Vietnam.’ Indeed, think of Tim O’Brien. As a White Person, he couldn’t write about most of his life experience, which was probably just like Father Knows ...”

“... we’re trying to reach men … maybe we should target people that “like” Bruce Willis’s page because he’s an action star … That was what you did.’ However, he said, Facebook’s increasingly sophisticated machine learning has made such discussions a waste of time. ‘Facebook has basically internalised all that and now you’re just feeding it ...”

“... inside information on the Tour is not to be found in a competitor’s words. In The Rider, his 150-page account of a 150-kilometre bike race, the Dutch novelist Tim Krabbé compares the mind of a professional cyclist to a flawless ball-bearing: ‘Its almost perfect lack of surface structure ensures that it strikes nothing ...”

“... up the previous year, an online edition of the Sunday Times. My first thought when the front page loaded was that somebody in the Murdoch organisation must be in terrible trouble. They had obviously been messing around with imaginary stories on their system in the small hours of the morning, and one of them had accidentally gone live. I can’t remember ...”

“... he had shown my poem “anche a Domini Deo”.’ Pound asked his publisher for a special set of page proofs containing only the ‘Malatesta Cantos’, which he would be ‘sending ... to il Comandante’ in Rimini. Eight years later he recalled Marchetti in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, his most sustained defence of the Fascist regime: ‘NOI CI FACCIAMO ...”

“... more consideration, gets nine lines, and Chandler only dates of birth and death, White gets a page and a half (68 lines) and a humanist fanfare: ‘These and other novels ... are outstanding in their range of social portraiture, psychological penetration, imaginative power, in their deep instinctive understanding of the true life-giving sources of the ...”

“... of indeterminacy of many younger people, their rejection of fixity and concerns with fluidity. Tim Parks, a translator as well as a writer of fiction, says in The Novel: A Survival Skill that ‘we involve ourselves in ongoing relationships with writers and position ourselves in relation to them and the kind of stories they tell, much as we position ...”

“... recognition. The process can be seen at work in Google’s translation software. Translate was a page on Google into which you could type text and see it rendered into a short list of other languages. When the software first launched, in 2006, it was an impressive joke: impressive because it existed at all, but a joke because the translations were wildly ...”

“... them as a threat to imperial unity until in 1922 a friend, the Irish nationalist politician Tim Healy, persuaded him to turn his papers in favour of a settlement and to support the negotiations that led to the establishment of the Irish Free State. Come to that, Beaverbrook was not particularly pro-English (Scots were a different matter). He felt no ...”

“... which specialises in – inter alia – drugs, arms smuggling and money laundering. (In a 488-page submission to the Audiencia Nacional last year, the prosecutors presented evidence that a leader of the Tambov gang, Gennady Petrov, had been a shareholder in the 1990s in Bank Rossiya, along with several close allies of Putin. After he became president, the ...”

“... you something about Saul Alinsky. He wrote a book called Rules for Radicals. On the dedication page, it acknowledges Lucifer, the original radical who gained his own kingdom. Now, think about that … So are we willing to elect someone as president who has as their role model somebody who acknowledges Lucifer? Think about that. (Although Alinsky – who ...”

“... cover (a photo of a little boy), a bestseller a second time over. ‘Morante’s subject​ ,’ Tim Parks wrote in PN Review in the 1980s, ‘is the fairly common one of the child, every child, who grows up, grows away from the beauties and innocence of infancy to the complications and very often horrors of adult life, of consciousness, of history.’ That ...”

“... Parliament, where I marvel most at how fluently she turns the (vellum) pages of her text, the next page always fingered and ready for turning when she comes to the end of the one she’s reading. I couldn’t do it.28 June. Someone writes to me reporting a signpost on the canal at Skipton which apparently reads ‘To Leed’s’.I suppose Hawe’s could follow ...”

“... millions which had made it possible to bid for House of Fraser. The DTI inspectors, in their 800-page report, describe all this with deadpan relish and then, item by item, ‘set out what we are satisfied is the story of their origins and background’ – the true story, that’s to say. Ali Fayed, al-Fayed’s father, we learn, was not a shipping magnate ...”

“... it sit in their bank earning interest. Take a look at the balance sheet, however, and at the page after page of corporate reports and footnotes which accompany it, and it’s a different story. High levels of deposits mean high levels of liabilities; and high levels of liabilities oblige a bank to have high levels of ...”