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“... as a model for them to emulate. Perhaps it should be shown to Mrs Thatcher.17 July. Supper with Don S. and his wife, Barbara, and with David and Maureen V. They have all recently visited Poland, where they were taken to see the church of the murdered priest Father Popieluszko, which is in the process of being turned into a shrine. Here in the church is the ...”

“... the archives may be woefully incomplete. ‘Even in the Armani show,’ Steele laments, ‘you don’t see much early work.’ The Armani show has been controversial less because of its archival gaps than because of its high-art production values and streetwise commercial subtext: Giorgio Armani is reportedly giving the Guggenheim $15 million for various ...”

“... of Durham, the Scots Episcopalian bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, and the Anglican atheist Don Cupitt belong more convincingly in liberal ranks than with authentic enemies of the Enlightenment on the Christian right. We should not discount the vital progressive function performed by a learned clergy exposed to mainstream higher education. Take the ...”

“... could not go back to being a regular word.’ The language of the portal arouses suspicion: ‘“Don’t normalise it!!!!” we shouted at each other. But all we were normalising was the use of the word normalise.’ It’s not that this posturing is a threat to free speech, but that it’s a distraction, a pseudo-battle for justice that masks a real one ...”

“... your subject matter is the lives of fatalistic losers. The book takes off from an idea latent in Don DeLillo’s White Noise: a patient receives a death sentence but lacks discernible symptoms; in this case, there is also no discernible cause, no airborne toxic event. The condition, called Goldfarb-Blackstone Preparatory Extinction Syndrome, aka ...”

“... arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David ...”

“... through the gaps in his clothes. But more commonly, as in The Political Banditti of 1786, he is Don Quixote tilting at latter-day windmills, rusting armour not quite concealing a bare, exposed foot or stringy buttock. This was partly a reference to Burke’s real economic straits. The payments on his estate at Beaconsfield, a crucial part of his ambition to ...”

“... faithful to the spirit of his subject-matter. With the single-minded dedication of a Casanova or a Don Giovanni he records several hundred literary encounters of Dick and Fanny, Pego and Pussy, until exhaustiveness gives way to exhaustion. What is most strikingly absent is any sustained attempt at scholarly analysis of the material he presents in such ...”

“... worse, he says, ‘by lying to him about my whereabouts and state of fitness’. The luckless Don Howe, who Adams liked and respected, was, he thinks, happier at Wimbledon ‘than dealing with some of the problem players he had at Arsenal’. The most powerful manager during Adams’s time at Arsenal – excluding for the moment Arsène Wenger – was ...”

“... their lapfuls of wizened beans. There must be a connection here. The British Intelligence services don’t divulge the sort of stuff they gave Boyle out of the kindness of their hearts. Most ‘authoritative’ books about them have rather the status of Palace memoirs by governesses and grooms: as a brass watch for long service, a few veterans of relatively ...”

“... Weld seems to speak to Bloomsbury directly from the movie screen. The friends keep pressing. They don’t just want information, they want him to convey ‘the feel of the event’, and even offer a hundred dollars for the privilege. When Bloomsbury (a good modernist) insists that he can discuss ‘the meaning but not the feeling’ of the experience, they ...”

“... invariably linked with a group of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not ...”

“... appears to have assumed he would get a first and slide effortlessly into the life of an Oxford don. When he didn’t, that future was suddenly closed to him.The result meant that Tawney had to find a job and a different path to achievement. But it also inserted a kind of awkward question, a sort of foundational discomfort, into Tawney’s relationship with ...”

“... attacks, she responded that the term was ‘painfully accurate’, and mounted a defence of David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, as if the prescriptive Englishman posed the already canonised Americans a grave threat. ‘We cannot be all the writers all the time,’ she wrote. ‘We can only be who we are … Writers do not ...”

“... essays on the social organisation of Norwegian ships or riffs on the stupidity of the cocktails don’t matter (though it does raise a smile that they have to attend the Sören Kierkegaard Dining-Room). Stylish metaphors are suddenly welcome (a neighbour of Albert’s, an investor, steers his Fairlane ‘into his driveway with one index finger, as if ...”