“... in the New York Observer, headed ‘Twilight of the Great Literary Beasts’, Sven Birkerts and David Foster Wallace lament the decline in quality of the work produced by America’s greatest living straight white male novelists, citing Bellow, Mailer, Roth and Updike. Neither mentions Kurt Vonnegut, even though Wallace goes so far as to call the trio of ...”

“... bit of money.The tone is rueful rather than envious: on the whole the Impressionists – like most young artists starting out in bands – were generous to one another. Nevertheless, there follows a list of what the Pissarros could not afford: copper plates, an aquatint box, plus the services of a printer. With them, like Cassatt (and with her talent), they ...”

“... gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster Wallace (b.1962), the previous generation’s experimentalism was as much a way of looking at society as a renovation of novelistic technique. Writers their grouchier teachers viewed as rebarbatively modish or futuristic struck them as fairly ...”

“... times. For the first time being a Jew mattered: if Costantino Tritto would not remove the Star of David he liked to wear in his lapel, there might be serious reprisals against the town. The curious German officers who looked into Manduzio’s room with its Hebrew inscriptions and insignia caused a panic, but fortunately went away and didn’t return. But the ...”

“... aristocracy of welfare dependence’ – grammar school, Oxford on a grant, the easy-if-you’re-young-and-single 1980s dole. So he’s well read and fittingly self-conscious, aware that the unease he feels is not his alone, but one of the classic modernist positions. He’d like to be ‘no more than a single human man’, in the words of his hero, DHL, but ...”

“... Before it was a classic film, Gone with the Wind was a classic PR stunt. The film’s producer, David O. Selznick, announced that he would launch a nationwide search for the young woman who would play Scarlett O’Hara. The move provoked a furore; Margaret Mitchell’s novel, published in 1936, was already a national bestseller – it seemed that everyone was reading it – and the desire to star in the movie version proved irresistible ...”

“... but there were plenty of ways around them. In 1817, the Scottish evangelical naturalist and editor David Brewster filed a patent for an optical instrument he called the ‘kaleidoscope’. But the craftsman he had hired immediately took the instrument to a variety of London ‘tinmen’ and ‘glaziers’, who began producing their own versions, and ...”

“... know that the spoils of German rocket technology were unequally divided after the war: a handsome young aristocrat, Wernher von Braun, a major in the SS and the inventor of the V2 rocket, made it to the US with as many papers, instruments and scientists (118) as he could manage. (Von Braun had worked from Mittelwerk, a production factory in the Harz ...”

“... fringe groups. At the culmination of his triumphant visit to the UK last month, Modi, addressing David and a sari-clad Samantha Cameron and a 60,000-strong audience at Wembley Stadium, mentioned, in order to earn multicultural brownie points, one of the icons of the bhakti movement, Kabir, a Muslim weaver’s son, unmindful of Kabir’s distaste for bogus ...”

“... Wilson could imitate his true identity as a bluff, plain-speaking Yorkshireman to perfection. David Cameron once worked for a public relations agency and looks as though he was assembled by one. From Reagan to Schwarzenegger, the line between politics and performance has become increasingly blurred: during the US presidential debates, a soi-disant ...”

“... to W.H. Smith (where he was once falsely accused of shoplifting). Lists can keep you company. The young Meades liked pointing out mistakes in grammar and ‘factual inaccuracies’. He was beginning to cotton on to adults’ ‘dissemblance of their ignorance, their desperation not to be found out, not to lose face, their barely suppressed petulance when ...”

“... out of a difficult life is an idea that some moderns have endorsed. In his ‘Essay on Suicide’, David Hume thought it would be strange for God to deny us an option that even a malaria mosquito could inflict; Georges Poulet disagreeably proclaimed that death by one’s own hand is the only act that avoids the twin perils of a meaningless existence and a ...”

“... of which he had for many years been a generous benefactor), and suggested he instead see David Blumenthal, a cousin and one of the best cardiologists in New York. Blumenthal ran a series of tests, told Ben his heart would soon fail, and put him under the knife. The valve was replaced successfully. But there was a problem. A few weeks later, a stitch ...”

“... identification. A chapter of Backroom Boys tracks the process by which two Cambridge students, David Braben and Ian Bell, used elegant mathematical fixes to get round the limited memory available on home computers in the early 1980s while writing an epoch-making computer game, Elite: Whether the components are atoms or bits, ideas or steel ...”

“... bought from a ‘dying nonagenarian priest’. There is a scene where she attempts to corrupt the young seminarian staying with her parents by getting him drunk and showing him her stomach. ‘It’s like St Augustine always said,’ she tells him: ‘Oh God, don’t make me good, not ever.’ This kind of twinkling naughtiness can occasionally be hard ...”