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“... an impression of newness by means of gimmickry. Enderby is a portrait of the artist, with his own brand of self-indulgence concealed as satire. Burgess’s admiration for Joyce was whole-hearted: Joyce was his lodestar; but Joyce is a writer whose inspiration can only lead to pastiche, and to an ultimately toppling tower of verbal invention. The depths of ...”

“... until the Forties. They were aided by films (and in the Forties and Fifties a TV series) starring William Boyd – a star who in the geriatric last stages of his career had barely a hop left in him. At the crucial stage of Zane Grey’s career, 1905-8, Lina took charge as her husband’s literary agent, editor and financial patron. Using his wife’s ...”

“... enough?’ After one day, only the hookers remained, except for one the abusive bastard tried to brand with his Cohiba. The blacks went back to Watts, the Indians to the reservation. Leaving me to be the sole whipping-boy of the man who may have held a Harvard degree, but was a disgrace to it, cruder and meaner . . . than any of the street mobsters that Mr ...”

“... circulated, or any of nature’s other more minor confidences uncovered by the likes of Darwin or William Harvey. To learn the secret of life is to figure out that DNA has a double-helical structure. And while Perutz did not make that discovery, he did run the Cambridge research unit in which the most notorious episodes of the double-helix story took place ...”

“... Prescott when he punched a demonstrator, suggests something of this tautological quality. This brand of liberty is not in principle opposed to authority, not least because without its minatory presence it would have nothing to grumble about. Even so, it keeps a wary eye on the potential insolence of power. It is peaceable but nonconformist. English freedom ...”

“... Representatives, which means that the often mentioned potential for Trump to poison the national brand is grossly exaggerated. The source of Republican national power is Republican local power, which will be hard to shake until after the 2020 census, no matter how badly they behave. In Wisconsin, the Republican trifecta has allowed the party over the last ...”

“... advertisement hoardings and the Great Exhibition. Its gaudy vulgarity appalled such aesthetes as William Morris and, retrospectively, Nikolaus Pevsner, who wrote of Victorian manufacture’s ‘rank growth’. Dickens was true neither to life nor to his age. He was a cartoonist rather than a documentarist – not that the veracity of documentarists is to be ...”

“... on its reserves in the North Sea and Alaska. Thatcher, sensitive to the danger of a famous British brand being swallowed up in a hostile takeover, urged BP to move aggressively into the cash-strapped Soviet Union. ‘Start some investment rolling,’ she told Browne, who was then the managing director of BP’s Exploration and Production division. He ordered ...”

“... and it is not hard to find them dancing on its open grave. Others beside Peregrine Worsthorne and William Rees-Mogg are seeking to write off whole branches of political thought as a proven failure. The ground, it would seem, is left bare of anyone to the left of Margaret Thatcher; and the fact that she has at this very moment created so much trouble for ...”

“... of empty space. Nothing in the poem allows the thought that there is anything outside it – no brand-names or politicians – and the poem is characteristically situated at the very edge of land: as it were, at the limit of reference and experience and paraphrase. There is no such exclusion on time – there is in Montale’s first poems, which often end ...”

“... Then he met J.L. Austin. In 1955, the Oxford philosopher came to Harvard to deliver the William James Lectures, later published as How to Do Things with Words. At the time, Austin was the pre-eminent representative of so-called ‘ordinary language philosophy’, a form of analysis focused not on logic, but rather on the everyday use of everyday ...”

“... feminism has proved of interest to the second wave, and much of her work has been republished. William Maxwell, a friend and correspondent who was for years her editor at the New Yorker, published a selection of her letters in 1982, and Claire Harman, having edited the Collected Poems in 1983, published a good biography in 1989. Wendy Mulford’s lively ...”

“... Only Place for Sex.’ After Paul’s arrival in Germany, this is confirmed by his second mentor William Bradshaw (Isherwood): ‘Everybody in Berlin is equal ... It all comes down to sex.’ Sexuality, in this view, is an egalitarian force. ‘Nakedness is the democracy of the new Germany,’ Paul reflects after he has been taken to the open-air swimming ...”

“... text on it, published in 1905. It led to his work on allergy. So ‘allergy’ has its roots in a brand new disease. But those who criticised von Pirquet for creating the concept were right when they pointed out that most of its victims suffered from diseases that were neither new nor rare. As an English word ‘asthma’ goes back to the 16th century. And ...”

“... Also like his namesake, Dave is a verbal genius. Reading Self is often reminiscent not of William Burroughs, as Self himself might wish, or of J.G. Ballard, whom Self obviously admires and seeks to emulate (clear echoes in The Book of Dave of The Drowned World), but rather of Norman Mailer, particularly the vainglorious, dick-swinging Mailer of ‘The ...”