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“... words were generated by the celebrated youngish American novelist, journalist and story-writer David Foster Wallace. Although willing to tilt at shiny targets of grammatical contention (the ending of sentences with prepositions etc), Wallace was, for the most part, hunting bigger game: America is in the midst of a protracted Crisis of Authority in matters ...”

“... I would name him later. But he was obviously there in that hymn to expertise and daft prowess, the lane switch on the freeways. Hemingway: the writer Didion grew up copying out ‘to find how the sentences worked’, and one more artist caught up in the attempt to celebrate a very moral world where feelings are too precious to be addressed directly, except in ...”

“... he wrote, ‘needed private carriers to help them struggle along under great loads.’ David Bergamini, Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy We almost collided with some SS officers who were carting up silver and other loot from the basement. One had a gold-framed picture under his arm. One was the commandant. His arms were loaded with silver knives and ...”

“... Jewish, too. This discovery brightens Tom up. He now knows he is Jewish. He will wear the Star of David, like that on his Uncle John’s war grave, he will learn Hebrew and support the state of Israel. Tom has, at last, got a general idea, a myth, into his pragmatic head – a tribal and political idea to warm up his bleak sense of duty. Tom is more ...”

“... applications, are even more seriously flawed than the data. One of the Minnesota researchers, David Lykken, wants to prevent low IQ mothers from having children (to ‘reduce the number of low IQ children’). This is, as the twin studied by Neubauer so nicely summed up that project, more ‘Nazi shit’. ‘A lot of social scientists are so scandalised ...”

“... very sameas if he had written them –is marred by an arbitrary/obligatory sex-scene ‘in a deep lane that was sexual/with ferns and butterflies’. Indeed, Heaney’s treatment of sex is by turns coldly clinical (‘She is twig-boned, saddle-sexed’), adolescently furtive (‘my nightly shadow feasts,/Haunting the granaries of words like breasts’, ‘Who ...”

“... lists or placing us in impossible landscapes. ‘My earliest memory is loitering in False Memory Lane, idling in blissful suspension on amniotic briny, constriction without fear, muffled voices, gradations of temperature, quotidian rhythms.’ Meades acknowledges that the details he has accumulated reflect ‘the laboratory of our imaginings’ as much as ...”

“... twinklers of an hour, provoke my rage’) for Pope himself. Gerrard follows Howard Weinbrot and David Fairer in championing Hill’s biblical odes The Creation (1720) and The Judgment Day (1721) as significant expositions of the sublime in an age addicted to correctness; but the argument isn’t likely to persuade readers confronted by lines as poor as the ...”

“... he promised is not, after all, to be found waiting at the end of a deserted lane, or, if it were, we’d never know, because we’d be stuck in a traffic jam on the M5. In Search of England came out of a series Morton wrote for the Daily Express in 1926. It is an account of a journey around England in a Bullnose Morris, written ...”

“... shall stand/With its unshaken head, till time’s last sand.’ This last phrase was borrowed by David Kynaston for the title of his captivating history of the bank.* The exit of the deputy governor remained unequalled for drama until the resignation of another deputy governor during the Barings crash three centuries later, after a Sunday tabloid reported ...”

“... Victor Pasmore – there were more eccentric talents of various sizes, like Stanley Spencer and David Jones, who were very English (or very Welsh) and not international at all. In drawings of wrapped sculpture in landscape and moonstruck megaliths Moore and Paul Nash gave even Surrealism an English edge. You could find evidence of deep-rooted native ...”

“... and institutions that is not yet written, although the materials are wonderfully set out in Harlan Lane’s polemical, immensely informative, brilliantly imaginative When the mind hears. The Enlightenment generated individual teachers of the deaf, and the inevitable 17th-century books on method. These are truly philosophical works, many with that tincture of ...”

“... family were never told of the research. Dr Grey [sic] claimed the donor’s name was Helen Lane or Helen Larson (supposedly in order to protect her anonymity). In the 1970s Henrietta’s name was released and the Lacks family were shocked … to them a part of their mother is still living and is being made to live on.’ Click. ‘Behind the façade of ...”

“... Early on, Jones mounts a pre-emptive defence against an accusation he knows is coming. When David Aaronovitch smarmily remarks, one Oxbridge-educated staff journalist to another, ‘here we are, having our elite discussion,’ Jones tells the reader: ‘Some will claim that I am, myself, a member of the establishment. But it is not someone’s ...”

“... early death at the age of 44. As a boy playing on Berkhamsted Common, Greene had cast himself as David Balfour, and as a novelist he can be thought to have given his own bleak twist to the kind of ‘adventure story’ with which Stevenson’s name was for so long associated. In 1949 he began to write a biography of Stevenson, abandoning it only when he ...”