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“... detail and anecdotes, shrewd in its assessment of personalities, light on socioeconomic change. Simon Potter’s is more academic and astringent. Potter tends to be critical where Hendy is indulgent, but Hendy’s volume is more fun, while Potter’s occasionally dips into ...”

“... which her book is ornamented. Charles Darwin’s maternal grandfather was Josiah Wedgwood, master potter and aggressive manufacturer, and like Erasmus Darwin a member of the Society which gives this book its title. These ‘learned insane’, meeting each full moon, were much concerned with tending the fragile light of progress. Always keen on problems of ...”

“... The Casual Vacancy is as much an event as a novel – J.K. Rowling’s first book for adults! – but only the novel aspect can be reviewed. Incidental atmospherics don’t come into it – an astronomer trying to establish the composition of a comet will try to look beyond the streak it makes in the sky. On one level, nothing could be more natural than that a successful writer should try something new ...”

“... Parliamentary Candidates into the strobes, to question, canvass and press the sweaty flesh. Simon Hughes of the Liberal Democrats, the local MP for Southwark and Bermondsey, regularly boasts of his clubbing credentials, gasping for credibility each time he does so. This combination of the carefree and the caring may not be Utopian, but it’s full of ...”

“... Simon Starling’s film installation Phantom Ride, commissioned by Tate Britain for its vast Duveen Galleries, takes its title from a cinematic fad of the early 1900s. Cameras and cameramen were hitched to the buffers of trains, and latterly trams, and filmed the track and scenery as they hurtled along. An early phantom ride was typically a single shot, just a few minutes long, which might, if you visited Hale’s Tours of the World (established on Oxford Street in 1906), have had its speeding colonial vistas enhanced with railway whistles, hissing steam and even shaking benches ...”

“... music accordingly, others – including the big guns of Western studies of Soviet music, Taruskin, Simon Morrison and Laurel Fay – trying to clear away the emotional-political undergrowth. The problem is aggravated by the fact that the autobiographical subtext is often so vivid for performers as well as listeners. The Emerson String Quartet found the ...”

“... Like Hoyle and Stephen Potter, Georges Perec was a devotee of indoor games. La Vie Mode d’Emploi (1978), a title combining lifemanship, gamesmanship and one-upmanship, was the monumental creation of an author whose other productions included a treatise on Go (the Japanese board-game) and a weekly crossword for the magazine Le Point ...”

“... Rich Loizou, a teacher from Devon, climbed onto the cab of the final lorry. At around 3 p.m. Simon Blevins, a soil scientist from Sheffield, managed to climb onto another lorry. Fellow protesters threw blankets, food and water up to the men, who remained on the lorries for four days. The three men did not attach themselves to the lorries, but their ...”

“... day at primary school I was surrounded by boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted ...”

“... died in 1958, at the age of 47), Back in the Jug Agane (1959). Unlike his 1990s successor, Harry Potter – the name of Potter’s school, ‘Hogwarts’, is surely derived from ‘The Hogwarts’, a Latin play by Marcus Plautus Molesworthus – Molesworth does not have adventures; instead he daydreams, ruminates and ...”

“... inspiration at least as much from the ‘positivist’ legacy of Comte (and his mentor Saint-Simon) as from the more obvious influences of either democratic socialism or Soviet-style Marxism. Some of the most prominent social planners of those years, such as William Beveridge and Barbara Wootton in Britain, Pierre Laroque and Francis Netter in ...”

“... were able to discount major titles, taking business away from smaller shops. A 608-page Harry Potter could be bought at Asda for a fiver. As the market share of Waterstone’s, Amazon and the supermarkets grew on the back of three-for-two offers and substantial price-cutting, many independent bookshops went out of business. The US didn’t have a Net Book ...”

“... peregrination to Oxford; my final airport walk, a curious hop, skip and limp from the late J.G. Ballard’s house in Shepperton to Heathrow Airport, where I enplaned for Dubai. In Dubai I dragged myself for two days across the overcooked city and then into the baking Empty Quarter, all the way dogged by a mounting depression. It seemed to me that in ...”

“... murder, the actor Stephen Graham on his suicide attempt, Maya Angelou on childhood trauma, Simon Cowell boasting, Alfred Wainwright on his last walk in the Lakes as his eyes failed (‘the mountains wept for me that day’) and Tom Hanks moved to tears discussing his lonely childhood. Plomley would have been horrified by such emotional outpourings. He ...”

“... and rearranging co-ordinates until the city conforms to his reading of it. No longer able to potter out into Notting Hill to check on some detail, he is in the position that Robin Cook found himself in when, working in a vineyard in the South of France, he decided to reinvent himself as ‘Derek Raymond’. Raymond’s late London novels are pure wish ...”