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“... which is the novel’s driving conceit, is plainly impossible, which is the point: like H.G. Wells in The Invisible Man or The Island of Doctor Moreau, Miéville takes an impossible proposition and works through its implications with rigour. At some moments the novel resembles a thought-experiment in semiotics, except that it’s at least as interested ...”

“... sensation I had,’ Biden wrote, ‘was best captured in a line I knew from a sonnet by John Milton: “I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night.”’Biden became the tragic young man of the Senate, uncertain whether he should resign to look after his surviving children. But in his account the Senate’s old guard welcomed him and gave ...”

“... visionary and he was mad keen on high-tech military gadgetry. He owed the nuclear vision to H.G. Wells, whom he had known and admired for years. In 1914 Wells’s The World Set Free described what it would be to harness the energies of radioactivity, envisaging an incomparably powerful new explosive device called an ...”

“... Scott sentimentality to summon, with bicycle imagery, projections of an England that never was. John Major, a gap-year, work experience prime minister, sleepwalking through the job, as a profile-raising photo opportunity between serious employment in the banking and conference-addressing industries, blundered into a reprise of Orwell’s cycling ...”

“... with the publication of Tracts for the Times in 1833, grew in fame along with its great polemicist John Henry Newman, was denounced for being a semi-covert form of Roman Catholicism, and then suffered a colossal scandal in 1845 when Newman became the highest profile convert to Catholicism in the history of England, thus confirming what critics of the movement ...”

“... readerships. Thus Ascherson joins the oddly-assorted, lively company of Primo Levi, Oliver Sacks, John Berger, Edward Said and Germaine Greer – but from a slippery starting-point: the journalist is a specialist in nothing. Sometimes he seems to know that only too well, and to underrate his own contribution. Calling for work on the growing power of an ...”

“... from the lift. When they begin, Butts is living with a lover named Eleanor Rogers but also seeing John Rodker, an aspiring writer who is chiefly known today for his activities as a publisher of deluxe editions: a portfolio of Fifteen Drawings by Wyndham Lewis (1919), Ara Vos Prec by Eliot (1920), and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and Cantos 17-27 by Pound ...”

“... the remains of Josef Mengele and giving congressional testimony about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, among other high-profile cases. He died nine years ago, but the colourful interviews and writings he left behind enable Hagerty to provide a substantial account. In 1984, Snow, a chain-smoker in cowboy boots, was invited to Argentina by the ...”

“... American realism, once a belief, is now an idle liberty. Writers such as Robert Stone, Joan Didion, John Irving and even Don DeLillo, are praised for their ‘realism’, for the solidity of their plots, the patience of their characterisation, the capillary spread of their social portraits, the leverage of their political insight ...”

“... her earlier life. He knows her handsome brother Jeremy, currently up at Magdalen. His best friend, John ‘Pimlico’ Price, a manufacturer of sweets, is an acquaintance of her former lover, Geoffrey. Theo seems to go out of his way to throw Evelyn and Price together. It emerges that Jeremy is bisexual, and has been Price’s lover. Evelyn herself, in freakish ...”

“... Pater and the statistician Karl Pearson, the political economist Harriet Martineau and Dickens’s John Harmon in Our Mutual Friend – all these Victorians, real and imaginary, deliberately extinguish some aspect of their personality in order to find out a hidden (and often unpleasant) truth. Levine calls these willed acts of self-suppression ‘something ...”

“... show buildings that are still quite recognisable today; pictures of the ‘Cromwell curve’, with John Fowler’s concrete bridge of 1867-9, are evidence of the scale of engineering work now masked by later building and softened by vegetation. The railways have proved adequate. Reading the plans of the St Mary Abbots Hospital, on the other hand, shows how ...”

“... stone structure. The Barrans Fountain was built by the Victorian clothing manufacturer Sir John Barran, once also the city’s mayor. He must have been a man with ambition. A building he constructed in the city centre is Moorish and beautiful, a small glimpse of Granada in the middle of West Yorkshire, though it was nothing more grand than a ...”

“... Soho. Closer inspection reveals a Metro sign across the street, surely the clincher. But no: John Davenport, writing in Lilliput 17 years later, claimed he knew the joint concerned. ‘If you know Hastings really well you may recognise it.’ Hastings or wherever (‘Burra-Burra Land’ Davenport called it), Burra created here one of his finest greed ...”

“... of his great friend, Bevan, quotes this passage from an obituary of Gaitskell, written in 1963 by John Strachey, who had strong relations with both men and who attended, as they did, the weekly dinner given for a small group of ministers by Stafford Cripps. Bevan, writes Foot, ‘would give Gaitskell a verbal lashing, and Gaitskell would reply with cold ...”