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“... to 1010 WINS, a New York City radio station, this is a traffic report. But for the poet Kenneth Goldsmith, such sentences are the makings of a book: Goldsmith – who calls his practice ‘uncreative writing’ – transcribed, or says he transcribed, a full day of reports, which he then published as Traffic, which was ...”

“... publications has also been quick to emerge. In Search of Excellence was cloned by Clutterbuck and Goldsmith (he of that bastion of class warfare known as the Institute of Directors) in The Winning Streak, and by Ronnie Lessem in The Roots of Excellence. Old entrepreneurs like Marcus Sieff and Charles Forte have published autobiographies of an altogether more ...”

“... violence and corruption the raw reality of Red Harvest.’ No mean achievement. But that was it. Walter Allen is another Thirties man. Senior to Mr Symons by less than a year, he was the first boy from King Edward’s Grammar School, Ashton, ever to attempt Oxford entrance, being sent up to Balliol as a candidate for a scholarship in English literature. He ...”

“... stock. He was born in Exeter around 1547, the eldest of eight children of Richard Hilliard, a goldsmith, and Laurence Wall, the daughter of Richard’s former master (her name recurs in later generations of the family in the more sophisticated form of Laurentia). Much has been made of Hilliard’s Englishness, because the best-known painters of Tudor ...”

“... but played with plenty of the other kind. On one occasion he was with his Harvard classmate Arthur Goldsmith and a couple of chorus girls when they ran into Rose at a roller-skating rink. ‘Joe, arm in arm with his “charmer”, was able to talk himself out of that one,’ Goldsmith said. After graduating from Harvard in ...”

“... Beckett classify the world compulsively, but only to make a mockery of the whole futile business. Walter Shandy, the obsessive rationalist of Sterne’s great novel, is clearly insane. Seduced by an image of pure reason, Gulliver ends up in much the same state. At the same time, Ireland was wary of the empiricism of its colonial rulers. It was too earthbound ...”

“... on it. True Englishmen either become non-nationalists and ‘citizens of the world’ (Swift, Goldsmith), or in some way or other spokesmen for a deep commonalty (or maybe a depressed commonalty) surviving below the Hanoverian consensus (Blake, Stephen Duck, the poet-labourer, who drowned himself in a fit of despondency). In a way, Lucas is most ...”

“... and visionary’, a crazy-learned man whose vision was like molten gold (he was by trade a goldsmith), from which he made trinkets with his words, which are ‘as worthy of preservation as much of the solemn and weighty pronouncements of heavyweight puritans’ – all of whose utterances have crumbled to dust. Muggleton had a knock-down answer to ...”

“... Johnson was soon the star attraction of a circle that included Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, Frances Burney and Joshua Reynolds, whose portraits of the group adorned the walls of the library in Streatham. Hester presided with remarkable wit, vivacity and in Burney’s neologism, ‘agreeability’; in both contemporary and modern estimations ...”

“... by phrases like ‘as it transpired’, ‘if you take my meaning’ and ‘if you follow me, Walter,’ little verbal tugs intended to make sure her audience is still at her heels, following her down the track of some interminable, over-detailed and ultimately inconsequential narrative. Dad suffers this tedious saga with as good grace as he can ...”

“... compound idiom, both tactile and intellectual, and one cannot find a prototype for it in Swift or Goldsmith, any more than in Montaigne. My feeling is that largely Hazlitt made it up. Paulin, less satisfied, weighs in with Dissent. He reminds us that for the original believers in the moral sense, both words would have been stressed. Francis Hutcheson supposed ...”

“... and a burglar, Thomas Mason (‘alias Humming Tom’), who had broken into the house of Sir Walter Cope. There was the woman from Finsbury accused of ‘cozening Elizabeth Barnes of certain money for a little powder in a paper’: she had promised that Elizabeth ‘should have her purpose of musicon by carryenge the powder about her’, apparently ...”

“... science at the Catholic University, and became engaged to the playwright and theatre critic Walter Kerr. He broke her heart. (Years later William Shawn told a colleague that Kerr would never write for the New Yorker ‘because of Maeve’.) In 1941, Brennan moved to Manhattan and soon found work at Harper’s Bazaar, where she stayed for seven ...”

“... one ‘Christofer Marley, by his profession a scholer’ home to him as a prisoner, along with a goldsmith called Gifford Gilbert, with whom Marlowe had been trying to counterfeit Dutch shillings before being shopped by his one-time accessory and room-mate Richard Baines. Flushing, the major port serving the English soldiers fighting on the Protestant side ...”

“... and Sidmouth. There were fellow poets such as Felicia Hemans, Tom Moore, Samuel Rogers, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey; artists of various kinds including the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George Colman the younger, various ...”