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“... Schoenbaum. He was right, though no one was especially impressed by the stunt; Schoenbaum had the English Department secretary reply to the letter. When Foster finished the book, he submitted it, was turned down again, and pulled the same trick again, this time identifying the anonymous reader as Stanley Wells. Foster wrote to Wells, without letting on how he ...”

“... The deaths of his brother and sister accentuated this. His older brother, Joe, died over the English Channel (British radar upset the delicate wiring on his explosive-laden plane: the American bases in the South of England had turned their radar off but had not asked their allies to do the same). And he lost his favourite sister, Kathleen, a fellow rebel ...”

“... son of a high official working for the shah. Homa Katouzian, his previous biographer in English, ascribes his consistent opposition to ‘any concession to any foreign power’ to this early impression of popular anger at European encroachments on Iran’s sovereignty. Mossadegh, whose family belonged to the nobility and who was honoured as a child ...”

“... with the manner (so Etonians said) of a Harrovian’ – but also over the blunter evocation of Richard Hoggart as ‘the grammar school extramural lecturer’. Our Age had its traditions, ‘was a gentleman’, as Kermode says, and pretty much ran the whole show, ‘being powerful yet negligent’. Our Age also turned out to be rather keener on Margaret ...”

“... and make-up probably owed more to stage adaptations of Frankenstein than to the novel itself. Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption: or the Fate of Frankenstein, which opened on 28 July 1823, ran for 37 performances in London, with Mr T.P. Cooke a great success in the role of –––, as the play called Frankenstein’s creature. Mary Shelley, who went ...”

“... life of the mediatised book group: Oprah’s Book Club had just returned from a year’s break and Richard and Judy were about to launch a UK version. (It was also a good year for coffee: by 2003 there were 425 Starbucks branches in the UK, up from 50 in 1998.) Consumers across the Anglophone world faithfully bought books, nearly finished them and then joined ...”

“... The Power Elite, The Organisation Man, The Feminine Mystique and The Making of the English Working Class – you’ll find they depict a world moving towards an almost claustrophobic cohesion. Classes consolidate, whites push down on blacks, blue collars are hemmed in by white collars, and grey flannel suits march down city streets lined with ...”

“... ragged plastic: a loud fake, a deterrent to keep random passerines and crapping gulls off honest English soil. It shrieked and hissed in the wind, lacking claws and beak. The passengers heading for the pier didn’t even notice it. If you travel against the inrushing City surge, the cattled mob decanted at Fenchurch Street station, a railway excursion to the ...”

“... in some more obviously dissenting voices. I set up a lunch in Strasbourg between Farage and Richard North, UKIP’s research head, and three leading members of the Green fraction from Finland, France and the Netherlands. In their conversation, the Greens argued eloquently for the necessary existence of the EU. Now that capital operates ...”

“... hedges and hides. Reason is a scoundrel, stupidity is direct and honest.’ This is the wording of Richard Pevear’s and Larissa Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit ...”

“... about metaphysics: they parted with their entrance fee not for the sake of enlightenment but, as Richard Altick once put it, out of a simple – no doubt very human – ‘desire to be baffled’. The bafflement was sustained on both sides of the Atlantic for more than sixty years, but in the 1830s it was revealed that Kempelen and later proprietors of the ...”

“... and in Burney’s neologism, ‘agreeability’; in both contemporary and modern estimations an English Madame de Staël. Her competitor for this honour – and another of her guests – was Elizabeth Montagu, against whom Hester shone for her excesses. ‘Mrs Montagu … reasons well, and harangues well, but wit she has none,’ Fanny Burney wrote. ‘Mrs ...”

“... Tower had its 15 minutes of fame in 2013 when a helicopter, on the way to pick up the tycoon Richard Caring, hit it in fog and crashed, killing the pilot and a pedestrian on his way to work. It is a building so ugly and so out of place – so disproportionate, so brutally disrespectful of its environment and context – that you will, if you pass it ...”

“... they tend to concentrate on themes and characters rather than techniques or questions of language. Richard Eyre’s film Iris (2001) is well paced, well acted, and offers a moving portrait of Murdoch’s succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease. But there is no sense of the writer in the film. We just get the sprightly young woman, the honoured dame and the person ...”

“... for American independence. John Adams hops back and forth, his diction slicing the King’s English into definitive new states. Thomas Jefferson, dressed in mauve, so sexual he can barely speak coherently, lounges on the window seat in a soft-focus rapist’s reverie, dreaming of not freeing his slaves after he dies. His wife sings a nymphomaniacal song ...”