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“... In a way he was like the country he lived in, everything came too easily to him.’ Mrs McFarlane told me she heard someone say this in a movie. There was nothing in the movie that wasn’t just rubbish, she said. But the afternoon she heard those people talking on the screen it made her upset and she said it was bad for her to get upset. It was all to do with the Living Channel ...”

“... Today there are only second acts in American lives. No generation to find itself interestingly lost in Paris; no elegant tribe crowding the lawn with portents of disaster at Gatsby’s parties; no collective urge to write the great war novel; no second sex. To judge by the best of the new writing, the most urgent of the new films, the most-watched television, American lives are now devoted to a wholesale inhabitating of the dead afternoon ...”

“... If you want to know what is happening in the mind of the average teenage boy you must follow the action of his thumbs, because the eager digits that might once have flicked through the pages of Hotspur or Penthouse are now more likely to be employed in a fight against universal evil in one of its modern guises. Last year saw the greatest ever increase in sales of computer games, to the point where the world’s biggest titles – Halo 3, for example – reliably bring in more cash than most blockbuster movies ...”

“... Penguins​ are super-parents. When the female provides dinner she doesn’t just reach for the pesto but launches herself into the treacherous, icy depths, returning with a stomach full of half-digested fish to be spewed down the gullet of her needy chick, His Fluffy Eminence, who is then installed in a creche so protective it makes the average nursery look like the workhouse in Oliver Twist ...”

“... he looks at Ford is the elegiac element in his westerns, the way his static camera summons what Andrew Sarris has called ‘his feelings of loss and displacement already fantasised through the genre’. The Old West is a vista of mourning, yet the films are about the funny and mysterious and sometimes savage ways that people survive there and go on to make ...”

“... colour, grace and music. Here he is at 15, writing a wee squib about the Pentland Rising: Master Andrew Murray, an outed minister, residing in the Potterrow, on the morning after the defeat, heard the sounds of cheering and the march of many feet beneath his window. He gazed out. With colours flying, and with music sounding, Dalzell, victorious, entered ...”

“... It was a Sunday morning, and a minister strode past me with a labrador. ‘That looks like a contented spot,’ he said, dog and dog-collar glistening. I sat in the middle of a little wood, just to the side of Kenilworth Chapel in East London, on 9 October 1994. The church looked closed and unattended. All around me, in tangles of ivy and nettles and scrub, lay hundreds of dilapidated grave-stones ...”

“... Ifirst​ walked along Brewer Street when I was 13. I was looking for a shop that sold film posters. It’s a long story, a four-hanky number, and it started in Glasgow the previous summer when I bumped into a busload of visiting Californians. I’d got talking to a woman who told me her friend had once been Marilyn Monroe’s nurse – I’m not making this up – and we swapped addresses ...”

“... It’s​ often the minor characters in British literature who appear as workers, usually larger than life, like music hall artistes. Dickens, of course, could see the public entertainer in just about anybody, but he was unusual in making people expressive of their jobs, and his novels display a panorama of the gainfully employed. In his fiction, there are twelve merchants and twelve nurses, 47 clerks, three milliners, four editors, three pawnbrokers, thirteen housekeepers, six inventors, two stationers, a postmistress and a pot-boy (Bob Gliddery in Our Mutual Friend), seven surgeons, three dance-masters, a reporter (David Copperfield), a tobacconist (Mrs Chivery in Little Dorrit), two fishermen, 32 teachers, four blacksmiths, six undertakers, 45 lawyers and sixteen landladies, several magistrates, a weaver (Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times), an umbrella-maker (Alexander Trott in Sketches by Boz), and many busy others ...”

“... On​ his deathbed, Saul Bellow asked a question of himself that he might have asked at the time of his first novel and his first marriage: ‘Was I a man or a jerk?’ You could say it’s a good question for anyone to ask, especially someone who wrote 18 books and had five wives. Next to Norman Mailer, who did equally well on the spouse-mongering front, Bellow was a worker of slow, monkish application, always tied, seldom happily, to a university department, and agonising over a book ...”

“... Since being acquitted of child molestation charges last summer, Michael Jackson has been hanging out in Bahrain, enjoying the hospitality of the ruler’s poptastic son Sheikh Abdullah. Jackson is said to have become a Muslim (which is sure to please his critics on Good Morning America), but evidence would suggest he has yet to get the hang of Islamic custom ...”

“... Nijinsky began to lose his mind in a Swiss village in 1919. He was only 29 years old, still dazzling, animal-like, an Aschenbach vision on the Lido, a young man who could jump and pause in the air: but he began to spend all night in his studio scribbling the same things over and over, the doodlings of the incrementally mad. The thing he drew was eyes ...”

“... The much gossiped about George Eliot absolutely hated the idea of people talking behind their hands. The year she took up with a married man was also the year Ruskin’s wife revealed her husband’s impotence during court proceedings. ‘Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it,’ Eliot wrote ironically in Daniel Deronda ...”

“... A spokesman admits that the cancellation of the Saturday night sleeper from London to Aberdeen ‘until the end of time’ is a bitter blow for those who like to wake up on a Sunday morning to the munching of Highland cattle, but there can be no question of having the train back, say the men at Euston. They can’t find a single soul who’ll agree to work the shift ...”

“... on family business. Julian sent me a message while I was in the Highlands saying ‘Big up, Mr O’Hagan,’ a reference he knew I would get to what a convict had written to him in prison: ‘Big up, Mr WikiLeaks.’ Other than that, and a few hellos through Sarah, we hadn’t spoken since the day he agreed to start writing. I rang Caroline on 9 May and ...”