“... Seaport mall development, ‘shopping is the chief cultural activity of the United States.’ James Rouse, founder of the Rouse Company, which designed South Street Seaport in the 1960s and invented the first enclosed shopping malls, said malls were the future in the cities too; shopping, he thought, was the answer to urban decay. He had his eye on Fulton ...”

“... for vices,’ ‘Lisa was meeting her father for supper,’ ‘He didn’t like attending County Hall,’ ‘The first person I was in love with was called Mark Lyle’ – all these sentences could have been written by the same person, the person who wrote ‘Frank drops me off outside the sisters’ flat,’ ‘You could hear the kids yelling in the ...”

“... in that respect remains immutable – The people speak Chinese and look inscrutable. The Great Hall of the People is the venue For a fifteen-course State Banquet every night. There isn’t any need to read the menu: You take a pinch of everything in sight. It all tastes at least wonderful and when you Happen upon a dish that’s sheer delight Just go on ...”

“... Yard. You can make it modern picaresque, a frenetic burst of lyrical futurist imagery, like Rodney Hall’s The Day We Had Hitler Home, which is haunted by the presiding monster-to-be of the war to come: an injured German soldier, arriving in New South Wales in 1919, whose name is Adolf Hitler. Or you can make it like Five Quarters of the Orange, a novel ...”

“... with a gabardine coat he picked up. Unfortunately, he ran into the owner of the coat in a pool hall a few months later, a student who had reported the theft of the coat from Nelson Cleaners and was able to identify a cigarette burn on the hem: the police had their burglar. There are a welter of coincidences and head-to-head encounters in the memoir, Braly ...”

“... with a warning. For years past, as I drove from King’s Cross to the Angel, I have noticed St James’s Church, Pentonville, at the top of the hill and have promised myself that one day I would pay it a visit. I was in too much of a hurry or the traffic was too dense or it was beginning to rain – there was always some excuse for pushing by. On the one ...”

“... for invasion and insurrection than those surprised Americans at Pearl Harbor. The movie (and James Jones’s novel, on which it was based) presented that peace-time army as a community wherein a vicious and slothful officer might neglect his duties, turning over his responsibilities to the Top Sergeant, while the Other Ranks (or the Enlisted Men, as the ...”

“... else they can think of – in Fenton and Fuller’s collaborative book of light verse, Partingtime Hall. I especially enjoyed the public-school master Mountgrace-church MacDiarmid’s taste in literature: Selected John Ashbery, Schuyler, O’Hara, Gravity’s Rainbow, and End as a Man, Young Torless, Cavafy and others bizarrer, Lord Weary, Das Schloss, Lady ...”

“... is to choose a strong narrative line, which means travelling light when it comes to what Henry James called ‘solidity of specification’. The other is to put together a portrait ‘from the life’, which is what Parker has done. This book is not, primarily, about Isherwood’s career, but about Isherwood. And Isherwood was all about Isherwood. His ...”

“... doesn’t even sound like a book I’d like. It’s the story of Martin Luther King’s murderer, James Earl Ray, mostly on the run in 1968, and mostly for a couple of weeks in Lisbon, spliced with reflection on a crisis (he of course doesn’t use such a word) in Muñoz Molina’s early life twenty years later, when his second child was born and he was ...”

“... lush, romantic account of the enormous, bloody, dust-filled adventure of empire. Morris – who as James Morris had fought in the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers during the Second World War – describes military expeditions, noble defeats and brutal victories with the same rousing relish. It was a good book to give to dreaming 13-year-old boys. But now I wonder ...”

“... the ominous title ‘I see a long journey’, and game for anything I set off. ‘Flora had met James when she was going out with his younger brother, Edward.’ Promising, because you know instantly from this that however well Edward might have done in the sprint, James is the one for the long haul. And so it turns ...”

“... estates. Others tried to cling on. The Earl of Powis stuck bravely by his decaying home, Lymore Hall in Montgomery until, at a church fête in 1921, ‘without any audible premonitory symptoms’, the earl and twenty of his guests suddenly fell through the floor of the great hall into the cellar. After that, sale was ...”

“... pool closed, my family followed the herd to Majorca. The Broadway was converted into a bingo hall, then a squash court and amusement arcade. I spent hours pushing coins into the penny falls, until in 1984, the year I turned seventeen and UK cinema attendances hit rock bottom, I moved to Glasgow.But my mother still lives in Prestwick, so I noticed when ...”

“... only nor mostly by sociologists – on just how the British class system works. And is the music-hall artist Marie Lloyd, overt topic of Eliot’s essay, its real topic? Or does she not serve, as token-figure and pretext, to fill in one otherwise unoccupied corner of the Eliot persona? ‘You say he has no demotic sympathies? Why, look here.’ An ...”