“... the success couldn’t last. In 1968 the New England Journal of Medicine published a letter from Robert Ho Man Kwok of the US National Biomedical Research Foundation. ‘For several years since I have been in this country,’ he wrote, ‘I have experienced a strange syndrome whenever I have eaten out in a Chinese restaurant.’ Fifteen minutes or so after ...”

“... people’ to pass. Even if you find the apartment, you might not find Blam: he may have slipped out along the narrow walkway that crosses the roof, above ‘the abyss’ of Main Square. On the other hand, ‘if there were a search warrant out for him’ the mansard’s seclusion would ‘turn it into a trap’. If cornered he’d ...”

“... Robert Lowell​ has a poem called ‘Picture in The Literary Life, a Scrapbook’ which begins:A mag photo, I before I was I, or my books –a listener … A cheekbone gumballs out my cheek;too much live hair.Not knowing the photo of Lowell, I go instead to the picture of Seamus Heaney on the front of the companion volume to this one, New Selected Poems 1966-87, painfully young, worried-looking, Noh-rice-flour-pale, against a dark brick wall ...”

“... be the best Irish poet since Yeats, which arose from rather casual remarks by the power-crazed Robert Lowell and the craze-powered Clive James, who seemed to have forgotten both MacNeice and Kavanagh. In the meantime, Heaney is a very good poet indeed – which is enough to be going on with.Heaney’s version of the Middle Irish Romance Buile Suibhne ...”

“... the most cosmopolitan writers of the time: one thinks of Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy and Robert Louis Stevenson. Every single great idea that fuelled the driving force of the 19th century – freedom, human greatness, compassion, but also the subcurrents of history uncovered by contemporaries, such as the libido, the unconscious and the uncanny ...”

“... still in his twenties Fried had become a leading critic of contemporary art, an occupation which may not sound very different from being an art historian, though perhaps less respectable. Yet from Baudelaire onwards, an engagement with contemporary painting has been vital to some of the greatest poets; and the best art critics, aside from those who were ...”

“... where they showed their gratitude by electing a man in a monkey-suit as mayor, an event which may finally have sent Peter Mandelson round the bend.) But Blair has not yet been able to embrace the referendum that Goldsmith among others forced him to sign up for, the one on Britain’s entry into the euro. The reason, of course, is not the will of the ...”

“... much like Manda Elizalde’s garden on a grand scale. The Fair’s twenty million visitors may have arrived in a state of complete ignorance, but having watched the antics of the captive Filipinos they presumably went away feeling virtuous that their country had brought belated civilisation to these savages. Filipinos still shudder at the memory of the ...”

“... subplot. Our ideas about metafiction are still strongly influenced by the 1960s: John Barth, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, William Gass. Thanks to the work of this group and the self-named characters of Philip Roth, we might well brace ourselves for archness or emotional coolness (rather than sincerity, warmth and optimistic political engagement) at the ...”

“... his stares and his silences: a skill he had honed in college, modelling himself on his classmate Robert Friedland, who transferred to Reed from Bowdoin in Maine after being caught with 24,000 tabs of LSD and sentenced to two years in prison. For a few years Jobs, who was already meditating and taking hallucinogens, ‘treated him almost like a ...”

“... the king’s subjects in 1931? In Delumeau’s late medieval and early modern Europe, the question may be answered with some confidence. In the Christian West of his period there were organic links between what priests and preachers thought and what the faithful practised, though we cannot regard them as congruent. The Roman Catholic clergy had both ...”

“... he was the natural prey of the rowing club but avoided having his sheets shredded when his friend Robert Byron repelled the would-be invaders, who ‘fell like nine pins before a barrage of champagne bottles flung … from a strategic position at the head of the stairs with a force and precision that radically changed the pattern of Oxford rowing for the rest ...”

“... had already happened, however ingenious and surprising, appealed to an inferior sort of curiosity. Robert Louis Stevenson saw detective fiction as ‘enthralling but insignificant, like a game of chess, not a work of human art’. Conan Doyle agreed. Detective fiction belonged to ‘a lower stratum of literary achievement’. That’s why he pleaded ...”

“... a Somerset gentry family which had served in India since Henry Strachey went out as secretary to Robert Clive. Jane was clever, as patchily educated as most women of her class and generation, but determined to learn and with ‘a vein in her’, as Lytton later recalled, ‘of oddity and caprice’. Richard, anti-social, a hypochondriac and old enough to be ...”

“... revolvers. It’s at least twenty to one that the guy who’s really hired Suggett is Mugabe. They may even hope to trigger a shoot-out with the present team of bodyguards. This is just what Mugabe needs to dramatise his claim that Morgan is trying to kill him. He’ll point to a whole big conspiracy with right-wing South African whites and then he can lock ...”