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“... Mai Jia’s success​ in the West comes as no surprise to his readers in China: we like our airport novels as much as anyone else. It’s odd, though, to hear Decoded – a thriller with a genius cryptographer as its hero – praised as a serious work of literature, which is how the Economist greeted it when the English translation appeared this year: ‘finally, a great Chinese novel ...”

“... out of Olive’s perceptions and her language. When, late in Olive Kitteridge, she visits her son, Christopher, in New York, we’re meant to imagine ourselves inside her wary suspicion of the city and of Christopher’s second wife and family; at the same time, we comprehend, with all Strout’s sophisticated distance, that ...”

“... of those outstanding biographies which have the deeper and wider resonance of a novel’: Christopher Booker), A.N. Wilson tells a funny anecdote about Mussolini that was new to me, though I had just finished Denis Mack Smith’s Mussolini. It runs: ‘Mussolini had in fact modelled his style of dress on that of his favourite film stars, Laurel and ...”

“... an organisation whose leaders have names like Dummy Oliver, Blinker Hall, Biffy Dunderdale, Lousy Payne, Buster Milmo, Pay Sykes, Tar Robertson, Barmy Russel and Quex Sinclair (not to be confused with his successor but one, Sinbad Sinclair)? It’s no good reassuring the reader that in the transition from Victorian days, when men called even their closest ...”

“... of the works published in his name: not Sir Francis Bacon, or Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe, living on in secret after his apparent death in a brawl in 1593 (before most of Shakespeare’s works were written), or one of the more than 50 alternative candidates who have been proposed since the mid-19th century. The case for Shakespeare ...”

“... so small it couldn’t be measured. Same with dance music in the heyday of the dance bands: Jack Payne, Henry Hall and Ambrose were all tuneful and popular; the more rarified Fred Elizalde at the Savoy was so disliked that he had to be dropped from the rota. And for the first time, as far as I know, a history of pre-war radio pays serious attention to the ...”

“... will always stand forth as a man whose political knowledge was complete,’ wrote the editor, E.J. Payne. ‘He was therefore, though a reformer, incapable of rash and inconsiderate action. The man who has arrived at a view of the whole plan of civil society, and taken in the mutual relations and dependencies of distant parts, is not in danger of being ...”

“... end of the war there were more than a hundred, each one the size of a very large bookcase. Diana Payne recalls her life tending one. She describes the finicky process of setting up a bombe (particularly when changing rotor positions) and her satisfaction at doing an important, though mysterious, job well. In 1941, the Germans introduced a new kind of ...”

“... to steal it. If, as I think, the only textual support for ‘bewildering’ was supplied by John Payne Collier, the Victorian scholar and forger, we can even say that Eliot chose a reading he knew to be fraudulent just because he liked it better. (You need authority to do that, and Eliot had some to spare: compare the acceptance into English dictionaries of ...”

“... Welles, Jean Renoir, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx and many others. Brecht and Christopher Isherwood had briefly lived and worked in the cottage where I was pounding out the first draft of an adaptation in collaboration with my director, Sydney Pollack. Isherwood now lived on the palisade just above the street. The memory of this creative ...”

“... has died of a heart attack at the age of 37 and Cohen, sunk into depression, is admitted into Payne Whitney, leaving a power vacuum at the magazine. (He would later commit suicide.) In Cohen’s absence, a dual editorship assumes de facto control of the magazine with Podhoretz forced into a subordinate role that he rightly feels he has outgrown; he must ...”

“... began pouring down his walls from a flooded flat above him. At 6.20, he got a call from his son, Christopher, who was outside, saying that a fire chief wanted to speak to him.‘Mate,’ the firefighter said. ‘Get ready. Someone is coming to get you.’ He heard a knock at the door and it was them. Two firemen.‘How many are in here?’ one of them ...”