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“... ever tried to write a Victorian novel? Here’s a beginning, with apologies to Sarah Waters and Michel Faber (and a nod to George MacDonald Fraser): London, 1860. November. A pea-souper billowing up from the flotsam bobbing in the Thames. The gas lamps already blearing. Good things of day begin to drowse. The rookeries are emptying, and their birds of ...”

“... or sometimes ‘neo-sensationalism’, whose exponents include A.S. Byatt, Sarah Waters and Michel Faber. M.E. Braddon’s secrets would make a sensational novel of their own. Brought up and educated by her mother, she was ‘a keen, precocious and eclectic reader’ of Shakespeare, Scott, Byron, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray and Wilkie Collins, but ...”

“... of pleasure’. While ivy-tower historians may analyse Ménétra as the prototypical homo faber of the Ancien Régime, some readers will fix on homo fornicator. These two themes – work and love – dominate the journal. Ménétra makes constant ‘offerings at Cupid’s altar’, and in later life sets up other households besides the one he ...”

“... builds on the collection made by the late Valerie Eliot and on many archives (especially those of Faber). Occasionally, there’s a page with only a couple of lines by Old Possum on it, and about fifty lines of small-print annotation, but the notes themselves contain a treasury of Eliotiana. There are a few very minor mistakes, but in scope, detail and ...”

“... what had happened to all of us. I first heard of John in the late 1960s when I was working at Faber and we were thinking whether or not to publish a translation of one of Alejo Carpentier’s magical realist novels. My boss told me to get in touch with someone called John Sturrock, who worked at the TLS and knew Spanish and knew about magical realism; he ...”

“... of Aristotle’s homo civis, Augustine’s homo sanctus, Benjamin Franklin and Marx’s homo faber, Gradgrind’s homo economicus, why has the late 20th-century culture of narcissism embraced homo sexualis as its definition of human essence? Why, as Jeffrey Weeks asks, have sex and our gender identities become the central part of being, the ‘privileged ...”

“... incorrigible shyster and a shameless counterfeiter. Hammer is the most colourful character in Toby Faber’s Fabergé’s Eggs: The Extraordinary Story of the Masterpieces that Outlived an Empire, which tells the story of the 50 imperial eggs, beginning with the Hen Egg, Alexander III’s first gift to his wife, Marie Fedorovna, and ending, after the descent ...”

“... terrible departures from civilised norms. As Bail later wrote in his Introduction to The Faber Book of Contemporary Australian Short Stories (1987), local fictioneers were licensed to subvert ‘a drought time of conservatism, conformity and censorship’ by following ‘the avant-garde strategy of provocative revision ... giving realism an extra ...”