“... means what we call an accident when we can’t face the fact that even this was predetermined. Henry Crick in Waterland is too superstitious to believe in accidents. Pumping the water out of the dead body, he tries to pump away ‘all the ill luck of his life’; that took his wife, that ‘had his first son born a freak’. But even ill luck sounds too ...”

“... racing career, and his life. At the centre of the book is the legendary silence of the trainer Tom Smith (‘As a general rule, Smith didn’t talk’) as well as the silence of the equine ‘legend’ himself, a silence marked, as if anxiously, by recurrent attention to what was going on in his mind. ‘Seabiscuit had the misfortune of living in a stable ...”

“... very intermittent sexual partner seems to have been a bus driver in Weybridge first mentioned as Tom Palmer: ‘I think that is his name,’ Forster says, with wise caution, since he was actually called Arthur Barnet, and had a wife called Bess. (In his biography Furbank was obliged to call him Arthur B–– and her Madge; Wendy Moffat sets the record ...”

“... brought against the British government by the Tory MP David Davis and Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson. They challenged the government’s blanket power to retain communications metadata, including emails, phone and internet activity, and the lawfulness of the police and other agencies being able to authorise their own access to them. The High Court ...”

“... daughter, going up to read English at Hertford, who evidently hadn’t wanted to come, and Henry James’s manservant (still living in Rye, but with a deaf-aid which had to be plugged into the skirting ) . . . contributing in a loud, shrill voice remarks like ‘Mr Henry was a heavy man – nearly 16 stone – it ...”

“... of realism which still dominate the English novel. Heralded by commendatory quotes from Tom McCarthy and Lee Rourke on the cover of this new gathering of previously uncollected or unpublished writings, Ann Quin now seems to be emerging as their best ancestor. She has all the biographical qualifications for the job of precursor, as well as being ...”

“... to Washington and tells the Yanks That while his Germany might still be Jerry The Russians are not Tom and have large tanks Whose side-effects it can take weeks to bury. Therefore he is reluctant to give thanks For Reagan’s speeches, which to him seem very Naive, as if designed to aggravate The blind intransigence they castigate. Congress is humbled by ...”

“... Martha, who stalked his rooms and disrupted his concentration with her demonic stare. Harrison and Tom had lunch every Tuesday with Donald Barthelme, who was at the height of his fame after being named ‘the most interesting writer of fiction in America’ in the New York Times Magazine. ‘We have a little block association,’ Barthelme told the Paris ...”

“... How to Listen, by Stephen Potter and Joyce Grenfell – the first of many satires, including Henry Reed’s high-camp Hilda Tablet comedies and Third Division, the comedy show that turned into the Goons. But mostly the press response was respectful. The social and political consensus that had created the welfare state had no fundamental difficulty in ...”

“... 1952 production of The Petrified Forest – with Humphrey Bogart repeating his classic 1936 role, Henry Fonda doing Leslie Howard, and Lauren Bacall as Bette Davis. The show went well. Bogart, always a bit of a snob, and once chucked out of Andover, was impressed that Dunne had been to Williams College. He invited the nobody kid to a party at his home in the ...”

“... a fake.’ ‘What is it?’ she asks. Sir Anthony gingerly suggests: ‘An enigma?’ Here as in Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood, the figure of the spy illustrates the irreducibility of human and aesthetic mystery, the contradictions that all personalities enshrine, the confusion that no amount of pedantic energy can resolve. In the Twenties, as a schoolboy at ...”

“... to the Promenade Concerts at Queen’s Hall. They read Proust and Spengler, Macaulay and Gibbon, Tom Paine and Cobbett, Hume and Herbert Spencer. They never missed a Harold Laski public lecture. They went in a solid phalanx to hear Shaw, Belloc and Chesterton debate at Kingsway Hall. And they formed an archaeological group to look for relics of Norman and ...”

“... his neck up, he is worth anything his brain can produce.’ He remarked of his friend Henry Ford: ‘This fellow Ford is like a postagestamp. He sticks to one thing until he gets there.’ He had a way of making his recipe for success seem dead simple: ‘I find out what the world needs. Then I go ahead and try to invent it.’He chose words like ...”

“... through accidents of war, unquestionably belonged. As Paul Cartledge writes in his introduction to Tom Holland’s new translation of Herodotus, the resemblance Thucydides’ merciless analysis of civil war on Corfu bears to Orwell’s reading of totalitarianism, complete with doublespeak, was exploited to some purpose by Thucydideans in recent times; and the ...”

“... lachrymose paperback as of Joyce’s Ulysses, as much a feature of Irish songs as of plays like Tom Murphy’s Conversations on a Homecoming – the knock at the door, the traveller returned. If Ford’s version is the most colour-saturated, it is also the one most infected with American anxiety about the high price of exile, the belief that for all that ...”