“... Even allowing for the low season, the coast has a desolate air. A few heads in bathing caps bob in the water. The seafood restaurant where I have lunch with the novelist Efrosini Camatsos, recently made redundant from her job as a university lecturer under an edict requiring all departments with more than 20 tenured staff to sack all teachers on ...”

“... after the surgery I vomit green gunk. ‘Don’t worry!’ I exclaim as I retch. ‘It will be fine! It’s just like The Exorcist,’ I say, before anyone else can. And so I spin away, back into the 1970s; I am easily parted from the present day. I remember the cinema queues and the evangelicals working their way along the jeering lines, trying to ...”

“... have been a clergyman in a Jane Austen novel.) A younger son of an eccentric landowning father, ‘Bob’ was born with a cleft palate which made comprehensible speech difficult for him and which, according to an associate, rendered him ‘seemingly little fitted for the utterance of any doctrine which could be deemed dangerous to social welfare’. His father ...”

“... and vice-presidential nominees (even Sarah Palin), with the exception of the nonagenarian Bob Dole; the Bush family and anyone who held an important post in the administrations of either Bush; 11 of the 16 candidates who ran against Trump in the primaries; the two most prominent Republicans in the host state (Governor John Kasich and Senator Rob ...”

“... even those sceptical about conflating a writer’s life and work will find it difficult not to see Bob Brennan as the prototype for the jealous parents who haunt his daughter’s stories. It was on account of his writerly aspirations that Brennan was riven by guilt at her own success. ‘The pain radiated by the Envious One,’ she wrote to Maxwell, ‘is ...”

“... political influence in Britain comes quite cheap. In late September, the former planning minister Bob Neill was found by a parliamentary committee to have breached its rules by failing to declare that he was being paid £1000 a month for ‘strategic consultancy services’ by a company that was handling planning permission for a luxury hotel development he ...”

“... It is another interior monologue, this time by a social worker at the end of his tether. Bob Munro is middle aged, fat, and a long-deserted husband. He hates himself and he hates his clients. His contribution to the cure of society’s ills he sees as no more use ‘than a fart in a hurricane’. Farts are very much to the point. The novel reeks with ...”

“... a place which rejoices in eccentricity. In their interviews with outsiders, the Irvings walked a fine line between insisting on the magic of Gef – ‘I am the fifth dimension! I am the eighth wonder of the world!’ he was said to have told them – and downplaying any suggestion that their visitor was anything other than flesh and blood and fur. The ...”

“... that the stairs were made of stone, allowing him to creep up to his room incognito, ‘pursued by fine arguments and sherry’.Mr Macfie wore brown trousers and a cable knit sweater over a plaid shirt. He crossed his feet where he sat. He was wearing brown, elegant shoes. ‘I am the son and grandson of Edinburgh lawyers,’ he told me. His grandfather came ...”

“... door. It has become a byword with us, your first words, remember? ‘How far would ye go for fifty bob?’ We’ve had times. I miss your guitar: I hope I didn’t damage it irrevocably. Sadie Until we get the official biography, which is being written by Fintan O’Toole, we have little chance of making sense of Heaney’s occasional naughtiness. But the ...”

“... no victor’s Tribunal. The only victor that will prevail in this endeavour will be the truth.’ Fine words, but little practical help to the team working on the original statute for the ICTY. They knew very well that while justice was undoubtedly done by the representatives of the Allies in 1945, it was not always in compliance with the law or legal ...”

“... the way for timid hedge-fund managers and City sharecroppers. The defining image of this era – Bob Hoskins (in the movie) with his sleek pleasure craft moored in St Katharine Docks, Margaret Thatcher schmoozing the Reichmann brothers in Canary Wharf – is the maquette of the proposed marina, the city of towers. A Lilliputian theme park of unimaginable ...”

“... of running a railway, this wasn’t a bad time. Under the reign of its boss from 1983 to 1990, Bob Reid (who was succeeded, confusingly, by a completely different Bob Reid), parts of British Rail broke even; subsidies fell to levels far lower than in comparable European countries; new trains were brought in; lines were ...”

“... medicine clinic in Tijuana in November 1997. Seventeen people arrived at the house of the poet Bob Glück in San Francisco that December for a ceremony with a Nyingma Buddhist practitioner. Most of the group consisted of what Kevin Killian remembers as ‘New Agey-type people who had helped Kathy in her last years. Tattooists, bodybuilders, motorcycle ...”

“... suite. She padded across to it and surveyed the unbranded but obviously fancy modern toiletries. Fine. She did what she had to do to be ready for the day. She checked herself out in the mirror. Good: as often when she’d just woken up, she had perfect bedhead. It was known to be one of her best looks. The next question was: how to fill the day. What ...”