“... rare. It is all over Utah. When Norman Mailer was writing the Gilmore book, compiling his 15,000-page transcript of interview material, he received a letter from a man named Jack Abbott. The man had a lot in common with Gilmore. Both had spent a huge proportion of their lives in detention. Still in jail, Abbott went on to dispatch a series of letters which ...”

“... results was its first and best-known invention, PageRank, the algorithm that assigns to every page on the web a value indicating how authoritative it is, based on the number and the authoritativeness of the pages linking to it. Its inventor was Larry Page (hence, cunningly, PageRank), one of Google’s founders and now ...”

“... and transparent blouses clotted with white flowers; ribbons, threaded through’ on the first page of The Last September. (Needless to say, this was nothing like my life.)And there was something so spiky in her sentences. The chunky solidity of her words and her difficult word order resisted any skimming along the top of apprehension. I felt the force of ...”

“... of his readers wished for definitive images and final statements, Goffman tells them on the final page of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life that his metaphors – ‘the language and mask of the stage’ – have served their purpose and can now be dropped. ‘Scaffolds, after all, are to build other things with, and should be erected with an eye to ...”

“... In Moscow, where I was living at the time (employed by the Guardian, as it happens, the paper Alan Rusbridger edited from 1995 to 2015), dawn comes early in summer and it was hot outside, though the city was asleep.* I switched on the computer I’d recently bought and connected to the internet. Once the screech of the dial-up had subsided and the browser ...”

“... that, as he says, ‘live in my heart and moved me to write this book’. His dedication page names a handful of friends then adds: ‘And for survivors.’ Why not ‘the survivors’? It seems a revealing slippage, this drift towards the generic. ‘The survivors’ would designate a distinct generational and cultural group, while ...”

“... and strangely skewed, like some sweatshop version of Vivienne Westwood. There are jokey names (Page and Turner for a publisher, John Elton for an American literary agent with a disfiguring hair transplant) and passages of broad pastiche, such as this from a novel about Shakespeare: ‘“Fye, Will,” said Lucretia, arching backwards and pulling William ...”

“... My mother is such a bloody rambling fool,’ wrote Philip Larkin in 1965, ‘that half the time I doubt her sanity. Two things she said today, for instance, were that she had “thought of getting a job in Woolworth’s” and that she wanted to win the football pools so that she could “give cocktail parties”.’ Eva Larkin was 79 at the time so that to see herself presiding over the Pick’n’ Mix counter was a little unrealistic and her chances of winning the football pools were remote as she didn’t go in for them ...”

“... the best word possible’. Implicitly he was talking about subject, object, modifier, but on the page you can see him working his queerest alchemy in the more obscure realm of tense. His reluctance to analyse his style publicly is in inverse proportion to the degree by which he must analyse it privately in writing it; only a writer very confident in his ...”

“... father was ‘in the print’, and Alec follows him into the business. In one lovely, lucid page Spufford hymns the compositor’s trade. Alec joyfully immerses himself in the physicality of work, held in ‘a womb of mechanical noise, to be monitored with some spare fraction of a busy mind, because a variation or blockage in it could be a sign that ...”

“... Afront page story​ for the Sunday Pictorial in February 1938 was headlined: ‘“Ghost” Wrecks Home. Family Terrorised.’ A recent series in the Sunday Pic, as it was known, had invited readers to share their supernatural experiences. Almost a thousand of them wrote in. Alma Fielding, a 34-year-old housewife from the South London suburb of Thornton Heath, rang the paper (a ghost didn’t seem a case for the police, she said ...”

“... years. In the course of that period he has spun off various lengthy by-products, such as a 732-page study of The Supreme Commander: The War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a five-volume edition of Eisenhower’s war papers, and special studies of Eisenhower and Berlin and even Ike’s Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment. Dr Ambrose’s ...”

“... while the source is cool and inscrutable. Snowden later told the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, that if ‘I end up in chains in Guantánamo Bay … I can live with it’. Greenwald is a former constitutional and human rights lawyer, and now a journalist who isn’t afraid to point the finger at the conventional and the powerful. Snowden ...”

“... so clear to our clear-eyed observer? On Tuesday 31 March, ten days before polling, both he and Alan Beith in Berwick expect a small Tory majority. The fact that the polls are telling a different story, however, is inevitably unsettling. It is only on 4 April that ‘the idea of a rout, a runner so recently’, can be dismissed. On 6 April, the Mail on ...”

“... and more localised description of the fetishism of the Cantos than that recently proposed by Alan Durant’. It is less sophisticated because it argues directly from the Freudian scriptures, not via the revisionism of Lacan. But the wholly indeterminate because unverifiable status of the Freudian texts nullifies the one argument, Trotter’s, as much as ...”