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“... Before Mark Costello became a writer he was a federal prosecutor. His first book, Bag Men (1997), was set in 1960s Boston. A priest is murdered on the runway at Logan. A new ultra-pure drug is killing the hippies in Cambridge; another one is sending them mad. The hero, just finished at Boston College Law School, explains to his wife why he wants to be a DA: they ‘help people ...”

“... John McCain for Rolling Stone in 2000, he was basically a liberal Democrat.) His roommate Mark Costello became a lifelong confidant and sometime collaborator. (Costello is now a novelist in New York and teaches law at Fordham University.) Wallace’s depression was recognised by William Kennick, the philosophy ...”

“... infinitely dense thing. And that … had kind of exploded.’ He collaborated with his friend Mark Costello on Signifying Rappers (1990), an odd, fizzy book about ‘serious rap’ and ‘the “postmodern” inversion’. He started, and abandoned, a PhD at Harvard. He booked himself into hospital with suicidal thoughts. And then things started ...”

“... Times book, Philby, the spy who betrayed a generation, which he co-authored in 1968. Mr John Costello has produced Mask of Treachery, dealing with Blunt, while Mr Robert Cecil has written a biography of his former Foreign Office colleague Donald Maclean. To round things out, we have The Storm Birds, Gordon Brook-Shepherd’s study of the Soviet agents ...”

“... in which Morecambe and Wise began, mimicking the hard-edged wise-guy contentiousness of Abbott and Costello and writing it small on the British variety stage. Very small. Their partnership was established in 1940 when both, already seasoned entertainers, were in their mid-teens. As Morecambe would later recall, they were at this point ‘two boys of 14 with ...”

“... beginning to experiment with the narrative unreliability and psychological sharpness that would mark his most accomplished work. And then, in 1991, there was American Psycho. I’m having drinks with Charles Murphy at Rusty’s to fortify myself before making an appearance at Evelyn’s Christmas party. I’m wearing a four-button double-breasted wool and ...”

“... as a result of an exploding ammunition wagon. Starvation confronted Plunket’s comrade Ned Costello, unable to provide for Augustine, his common-law French wife, and their baby. In despair he used the £5 he received from the Patriotic Fund to get mother and baby back to France: ‘“Ne m’oubliez pas,” were her last words as she squeezed my ...”

“... old life up to speed. He would go anywhere and do anything for the chance to suck somebody off. Mark you, even this desire had been coloured, if that’s the word I want, by advancing years. He tended to say that he did it on doctor’s orders (‘the potassium ingredient is frightfully good for one’). He did not, even when faced with decrepitude, much ...”

“... for change? Well, possibly. In an Australian Financial Review article, the former Labor leader Mark Latham maintained that the last year has been marked by a crippling ‘convergence’ between the Liberal-National alliance and Labor. Just as Blairism took over so much of Thatcherism, so the new Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, has been striving to ...”

“... of Coetzee as a mythically fastidious, apolitical figure. The caricature understandably left its mark: Coetzee has from the first displayed an acute awareness of the politics of his own authority as a novelist and, above all, as a white South African novelist. It is difficult not to read the opening of his 1992 essay on Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly ...”

“... others, often involving the Special Forces, perhaps yet to be explored or convincingly resolved. Mark Danner’s opening thesis, formulated of course before this latest round of revelations, is that the wide circulation of the Abu Ghraib photographs, startling though they were when first released, has increasingly worked to ‘block a full public ...”

“... Irish Times and found none. They were all by men. There was a short interview with a woman, Mary Costello, a writer whose sentences are notably clean and assured. Under her photograph a subeditor had put the quote: ‘I find the public side of being published very difficult.’ A single subheading read: ‘Shy and unassuming’. A poem, ‘Women’s ...”

“... a cult’, but sometimes, when no one is around, he puts on the music Señor Arroyo composed to mark his wife’s death, and dances until he has visions of silvery spheres.Enter a new educational expert. Dr Julio Fabricante, the director of an orphanage called Las Manos, is rumoured, as these proper nouns suggest, to be ‘an advocate of practical ...”