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“... Which is ironic, since one of the most dramatic upheavals in English naming occurred after the Norman Conquest, when parents chose to replace the wonderful and varied names of their grandparents’ generation – Aethelwulf, Aethelflaed, Frithuswith, Ealdred – with less personalised Toms, Dicks and Harrys. It is rather as if an orchestra had been ...”

“... There were also early biographies by Marilyn’s friends (the columnist Sidney Skolsky, the poet Norman Rosten) and her enemies – Marilyn, the Tragic Venus, based on the incriminating fibs of Hollywood scribe Nunnally Johnson. There have been plenty of biographies by people who worked for Marilyn, by her housekeeper Eunice Murray, her cleaner Lena ...”

“... through heavy clay to emerge in the shock of battle. The city shudders from the silent pounding of stone ordnance, the mute thunder of that lifesize howitzer by Charles Sergeant Jagger on the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner. Arranged on obelisks are squadrons of engineless planes that will never achieve flight. Granite battleships hide in ...”

“... literature, a degree of sophistication more easily found in an 11th-century monastery than at a Norman court. But the story reads like a fable; it’s full of the bears, dogs, horses and donkeys that populate Aesop’s tales. It’s possible that its dedicatee, Archbishop Robert, presided over a cathedral school at Rouen. More pertinently, after detailing ...”

“... chroniclers of that process, in full awareness of the ambiguity of the verb ‘to forge’. As Norman Mailer used vociferously to demand, who will analyse the analysts, if not the artist? Philip Roth, like John Updike, is a survivor from the glory days of the heavyweights, the Hemingways and the Faulkners and the Bellows. His first book, the story ...”

“... villas behind high beech hedges, looking for Hamstead Marshall. An ancient buttressed wall with a stone panel dated 1665 suggests we are not far off. And here is the church above the road, the tower with an 18th-century look to it and a medieval chapel behind. But it’s locked and no one about who could open it up. Fortunately, though, there is an opening in ...”

“... the Velvet Underground over Motown releases, the production skills of Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set ...”

“... had existed for nine centuries and brought about ‘the largest redistribution of land since the Norman Conquest’. It would take three generations to begin to recover from this ‘colossal self-inflicted cultural catastrophe’. What English architecture might have been without the Reformation is unknowable, but Brindle offers a counterfactual hint in his ...”

“... Life of Bellow, the authorised and definitive biography that groans with the graven heft of stone tablets. He doesn’t make this undertaking about him. As monumental as Leader’s investigation is, with its copious documentation and minute reconstruction of such a long, labyrinthine lifespan (just keeping track of the zigzag traffic of Bellow’s ...”

“... book itself was written in the Seventies and Eighties, a deliberate contribution to what Lawrence Stone has regretfully termed the ‘revival of narrative’. The narrative form certainly has its advantages, and Elliott knows how to exploit them. The tone is quiet and even, the style resolutely plain, sober, almost austere, but the author is very much in ...”

“... that American authors are particularly good at; he has written about the enmity of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, and now cites Berryman’s unease at Lowell’s pre-eminence (‘Who’s number one? Who’s number one?’). But how does this relate to The Information? Richard writes Joycean novels on a scale of difficulty that would make even Gilbert ...”

“... impressed. It was a building that worked, though made of ordinary and traditional materials – stone, timber and iron – on a limited budget; it was the product of a mind at once practical and imaginative. Throughout, as my then boss, Andy MacMillan, put it, Mackintosh ‘demonstrates a creative exploitation of each and every specific requirement, seizing ...”

“... Meades absorbed their contempt for light entertainment (‘Bruce Forsyth, Dickie Henderson, Norman Vaughan’) and their loathing of churchiness. As a pupil at the cathedral school in Salisbury, he realised his family was poorer than average: ‘They had parquet floors where we had stone or splintering boards.’ Even ...”

“... left behind me in the Herefordshire hills. I remembered her defencelessness as I made my heart a stone Till she wove her self-protection round and left me on my own. Summoned by Bells, Betjeman’s self-portrait in blank verse, was published in 1960. As Hillier puts it, neatly: ‘John’s generation was given to premature autobiography.’ Precocious ...”

“... press sensation, and the city’s dissident intelligentsia – Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, I.F. Stone – flocked to the Theresa’s ballroom, with Henri Cartier-Bresson on hand to capture it all. Other Third World leaders in New York that week could only complain of stolen limelight. Kwame Nkrumah, who had worked in a soap factory in Harlem in his ...”