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“... version of one of his own well-cut suits. While this surface stylishness characterises Wolfe’s own voice, with its caustic social observations and bravura displays of writerly technique, for other writers the chance to speak in an unmediated first person fulfilled a more urgent necessity. It allowed Michael Herr, on assignment in Vietnam for Esquire and ...”

“... jerseys. I was ahead a few bucks when the Ohio State centre put a savage elbow into Magic’s young chin and Doc’s screams of ‘foul’ were interrupted by the sight of a White House adviser about to break open a vial of cocaine. Doc slapped me on the shoulder and muttered ‘Jeeesus’ – a sure sign of impending ...”

“... performing Shakespearean tragedy, they were doing it in drag. I had been inspired, if that’s the word, by seeing the play at Basingstoke’s Haymarket Theatre, which recently lost its Arts Council grant and has closed down. I remember very little about the production except that the actors were wearing heavy woollen ...”

“... however. Gray typifies, even cultivates, ordinariness. It is his extreme passivity which is so attractive, his longing for identity that draws in the surrounding atmosphere like a vortex. He seduces the world in order to be defined or transfigured by it: to become somebody at last. And the world is only too willing to oblige. Emblazoned on the front ...”

“... company in the world that is also a spelling mistake. Back in the palaeolithic era (that’s the palaeolithic era in the internet sense, i.e. autumn 1997) its co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were graduate computer science students at Stanford. They were working on an insanely cool new search engine, wanted to incorporate it as a company, and ...”

“... important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.’ In the novel clothes propel the narrative of Orlando’s passage through time and gender. In Mrs Dalloway the green dress is in effect a character, an expression of what Woolf described in her diary as ‘the ...”

“... it out with DSK but Aubry was the only other candidate left standing. The story of Hollande’s nomination and the presidential campaign is told with wit and great charm by the novelist Laurent Binet in Rien ne se passe comme prévu (Grasset, ¤17), a Hunter S. ...”

“... world – including the US, where he was born – he remains best known for his children’s books about Frances the Badger. They have remained continuously in print for more than half a century. There’s Bread and Jam for Frances, in which she refuses to eat anything but bread and jam, and Bedtime for Frances, in ...”

“... still at school, which always seemed to me a rather melancholy fact – not least because one’s authority as a rebel was brought into question by having to attend lessons and the like. Out of hours, we worked hard to make good our sense of disadvantage, and a competition, which was incidental to following our favourite groups around London, started up ...”

“... when a composite figure called ‘John’ complains that the author is exploiting other people’s experiences: ‘I am owed.’ ‘You’re not . . . You’re like a . . . a cannibal or something.’ And owed, perhaps, as the book too often seems to assume, a sympathetic attitude to his capacity for huge self-indulgence. Rage and grief are important ...”

“... to be precocious in talent, humble in origin and, if possible, anointed by a predecessor – so he gives us Cimabue discovering the shepherd boy Giotto sketching a pastoral scene with perfect skill. Born in 1922, Richard Hamilton was a working-class kid whose gift for drawing was recognised early on: at 12, he talked his way into adult classes, and at ...”

“... him into trouble with his employer, the Dole Chemical Company, was the first to recognise MDMA’s mood-altering effects; he called it an ‘empathogen’. So deeply affected was he by his MDMA experiences that he eventually resigned his job, built a laboratory in his garden shed, and embarked on thirty years of research ...”

“... folds in the map, is that Paul Schrader, the director of a sassy remake of Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People, admired Penman’s review so much that he invited him over to Los Angeles to talk product. Penman in California was truly the vision of a man who fell to earth, a pale alien in ...”

“... the right to joke about such things was debated on the internet for months. Patricia Lockwood’s contribution to this debate, perhaps the only poem (so far) inspired by a social media controversy, was published in the online magazine the Awl in 2013. At the time, Lockwood, whose first poetry collection, Balloon Pop ...”

“... head: powder cocaine dealers are easier to find and more reliable. ‘More genteel’ is the way Hunter Biden describes his decision to ‘eliminate one layer of drug-world repulsiveness’ by switching from buying crack at homeless encampments in Los Angeles, where he had a gun pointed at his head at least once, to cooking for himself at his $400-a-night ...”