“... grows larger, as you leave the other buildings behind. Every few levels of scaffolding, pigeons took off. Battersea doesn’t look like a skyscraper, but it’s more than a hundred metres high. You come out at the top by pulling up over a ridge of bricks and scaffolding onto an expanse of grey slate, big as an empty town square, between two of the great ...”

“... chic (the ready-dressed blue and silver faux-fir). For the unsure, there are ‘treetorials’ at John Lewis or ‘Christmas design consultation’ for £250. They’ll even decorate your tree for you. Most companies are cleverer with their own displays now, and recognise the opportunity for spectacle. You don’t even need the tree – just a surprising ...”

“... a couple of years ago) I worked out the kettle was sucking in about three kilowatts of power. It took a minute to boil. The firm that sells us our electricity, Octopus, changes its tariffs every half-hour according to the price set at the auctions where it and other buyers bid for electricity from the companies that generate it. It was just before 11 ...”

“... particularly well in a series of drawings of the Madonna and Child, sometimes with the infant St John, made in the preparation of some of his best-known pictures, in which the children are endowed with an agility and poise quite incongruous for their supposed age but perhaps justifiable on the grounds of their divine status. It was in Rome, where Raphael ...”

“... Bronx. O’Brien is one of a long line of hicks from upstate who made their way to the big city. John Ashbery, whose work O’Brien disapproved of (‘the poetry of programmatic inconsequence’), had arrived in NYC 15 years earlier, from a farm near Lake Ontario. Many of O’Brien’s poems could be characterised as pastoral. This is ‘East Branch’: a ...”

“... not serious’, yet old myths are serious, and they die hard. To get his Faust off the hook, it took Goethe something like a verbal quibble, and then something even more like an opera, a massed choir of ecclesiastical dignitaries and assorted angels, tacked on at the very end. The essayists approach the subject from varying angles, and not all of them ...”

“... chronicles the work done by three investigative reporters, Stuart Prebble of World in Action, and John Osmond and David Williams of Harlech Television. Along with a police reconstruction on the BBC’s Crime-watch, they have ensured that literally millions of people are familiar with the basic circumstances of the crime. There was a moment when every amateur ...”

“... Edgar Hoover, Castro, Khrushchev, Howard Hunt, Earl Warren, George H.W. Bush, Duong Van Minh, the John Birch Society, the Freemasons or Aristotle Onassis. ‘I am not a conspiracy theorist,’ he begins. ‘I am a conspiracy empiricist.’ He wants to know the truth because without it ‘another president could once more be cut down in his or her ...”

“... they were acquitted). The availability of legal aid and the abolition of the death penalty took much of the public interest out of murder trials, and perhaps criminal trials in general, except the most horrible, such as the Soham murders of two ten-year-old girls, or those involving well-known public figures like Thorpe. Horrible cases remain the daily ...”

“... Now this is finally a category that makes sense to me. No wonder her titles so often remind me of John Ashbery’s. (He said that music was an even greater influence on him than visual art.) Williams’s titles are invitational or introductory, not explanatory: ‘Head of a Naked Girl’; ‘What a Great Man Learned about Reflection and ...”

“... you out of this fantasy is the first line of dialogue, delivered matter-of-factly by the farmer, John, to his wife: ‘Mary? I’ll ask you again. How many times did you come?’ This isn’t your average farm but a site of adultery, fecklessness, vice. This is a Kevin Barry short story because it could only be a Kevin Barry short story. There Are Little ...”

“... situations, often having used his wealth to make them happen. In 1931, he was the first to publish John Betjeman, who had been a fellow student at Oxford. In 1933 he financed the final collaboration between Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. When Salvador Dalí was nearly suffocated by the diving suit he wore to the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in ...”

“... Reagan and nominate plain-spoken originalists like Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork. Instead, he took the path described in my previous essay,* and tendered stealth nominees whose public records provided few clues as to future performance. Not that this administration was equally in the dark. During the 1980s, both ...”

“... marksman, but I don’t know of any. Murakami runs marathons; Joyce Carol Oates is also a runner; John Irving wrestles when he isn’t writing. Iris Murdoch often went swimming for pleasure; Nabokov chased butterflies; Graham Greene chased women. Hemingway’s idea of fun was killing big animals in Africa, but when he writes about hunting, always with macho ...”

“... to have been the fleeting ten thousand. Nor did he fail them. Bubbling with pride, he once told John Mortimer in a Sunday Times interview about the prostitutes he had known: ‘I treated them with consideration and like a gentleman. I always let them have their pleasure first. And of course I was enough of a connoisseur to know if their pleasure was ...”