“... years most children leave home.Gorey’s guest, however, neither grows up nor leaves. The last page shows the family, whose human son has become an adult complete with moustache, standing in a conversational group. None of them is looking at the guest, who is still the same size and sits on a tasselled pouffe staring blankly in the opposite ...”

“... the New Yorker, where Max seems to be subject to heavier editing than in this biography. Later on page 1: ‘Midwestern virtues of normality, kindness and community also dominated.’ The ‘virtue’ of ‘normality’ is something Max seems very intent on pinning to Wallace, which is strange because Max’s thorough and conscientious reporting actually ...”

“... On the last page​ of his book about his father, Patrick Cockburn writes that Claud ‘disbelieved strongly in the axiom about “telling truth to power”, knowing that the rulers of the earth have no wish to hear any such thing. Much more effective, he believed, is to tell truth to the powerless so they have a fighting chance in any struggle against the big battalions ...”

“... he prescribed. Their campaign inevitably had particular problems with the cultural legacies of the Norman conquest. John Green, with exactly the bluntness he advocates, longed for the linguistic and ethnic purity of Anglo-Saxon England. ‘Before the Conquest by Bastard William that the French came in,’ he claimed in 1615, ‘our English tongue was most ...”

“... about the teenage Lewis and his early obsession with Peter Sellers. ‘My first movie love was Norman Wisdom,’ we are told, and soon we are settling down with our narrator in the front parlour of the family home in ‘rain-lashed industrial South Wales’, watching old comedy movies on a Coronation-era TV with a wonky contrast-control. Next we learn how ...”

“... he can find: the theoretical writings of Isidore Isou and Guy Debord, Larry Clark’s pictures, Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, Theodor Adorno (in particular his great and mordant Minima Moralia), Christopher Gray’s Leaving the 20th Century, Abiezer Coppe, Georges Bataille. Oddly, the name William Blake never passes the lips(tick) of this ...”

“... in a game where each new transgression shocks less. Derek Jarman’s Blood (repeats of Sun front page reading ‘AIDS BLOOD IN M&S PIES PLOT’ overpainted in red with lines of the word ‘blood’ scratched white out of the red) is perfunctory. Aids, which gives these pieces a claim on our attention, tests them destructively by making it natural to ask ...”

“... In Cold Blood, which was the inspiration for more complex and ambitious non-fiction novels by Norman Mailer (The Executioner’s Song) and Don DeLillo (Libra). In the massive, magisterial The Best American Short Stories of the Century edited by John Updike, Flannery O’Connor is included with one of her much anthologised stories, ‘Greenleaf’, while ...”

“... movements in the structure of the beaches. In the course of his research, he unearthed an ‘Anglo-Norman’ poem which described how William (afterwards ‘the Conqueror’) had crossed the sea on his way from Cherbourg to Ries on a ridge of rock at low tide. The continued existence of the ridge was then confirmed by aerial photograph. Modern battles, it ...”

“... forty pages of marriage, and why people do these things God only – but we are straying from the page. Their quarrels, misunderstandings and jealousies were like those of other families. And she was like other girls who marry into a group of powerful personalities. She was tugged in different directions by all of them. They expected things of her. They ...”

“... their familiarity with Medieval English. The glossary entry for blanc alone occupies a whole page, and entry after entry supplies either new knowledge or informed speculation: ‘Balloc broth, balough broth, a fish soup ... Since there is no recorded meaning for ballok other than testicle, which does not seem appropriate for a fish stew, it is more ...”

“... notably Richelieu and Olivares, but one cannot expect to find incisiveness in a seven-hundred-page book. There are compensations, however. Having refused to exploit the advantages of hindsight, and kept close to the chronological order of events, Elliott can shock his readers, as Olivares was himself shocked, with the news of the twin revolts of Catalonia ...”

“... the extermination of the Jews to an SS assembly in Poznan in October 1943 as ‘a glorious page in our history’. An enterprise of this kind needs a rationalisation, which is why Norman Cohn entitled his classic history of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Warrant for Genocide. What about the ...”

“... The Gawain poet’s language shows much less of the French influence that was the legacy of the Norman Conquest. Instead there are northerly inflections, with outlandish spellings and flickers of Norse strangeness.We can splice these tells with a clutch of references to actual places in Gawain. While the locations described in Pearl, Patience and Cleanness ...”

“... tones of the progressive tradition extending from Mark Twain and William Dean Howells through Norman Mailer, Murray Kempton and beyond, you are mistaken. Mencken also wrote this: The educated Negro of today is a failure, not because he meets insuperable difficulties in life, but because he is a Negro. His brain is not fitted for the higher forms of ...”