“... So it comes as a bigger shock than the salmonella scare (Edwina Currie, 1988) or the BSE scare (John Selwyn Gummer, 1990) to hear the latest strand in the table talk: that the era of endless food is winding down.This belief is new. Until recently the discussion was largely about quality. Quantity and availability only entered the picture when we wondered ...”

“... like the whiff of cordite long after the gun has been fired. When I mention this to David Cornwell/John le Carré, he says: ‘I can still feel it in my nostrils now.’ Historians, like spooks, need a sensitive nose, Orwell’s ‘Sniff, sniff’ for the detection of ‘all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls’.3 (And, in ...”

“... British camp-followers? The instant success of Notes on a Cellar-Book on its appearance in 1920 took both author and publisher by surprise – a bittersweet exposure of their imperfect judgment of readers’ tastes. Saintsbury didn’t much like contemporary literature or contemporary trends in criticism. Distancing himself from gestures at ...”

“... by sex, in the same moments that stamp them as frightening: here I inhaled first plum blossoms and took the yellowjacket stings saying ‘sticks, I live in the sticks, don’t drive me home I’ll sleep instead on your rug, be your boy, just ask me to spread my legs, I’ll spread’ The self as teenage prostitute, as body for sale, physically open for ...”

“... in this drama: the Imagists – H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Richard Aldington, T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, John Gould Fletcher, Amy Lowell – as well as scores more who had a stake in the continuing vitality of literature, including Yeats, Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The writers, clustered in clubs or ‘gangs’, wanted to ...”

“... my palm Softly lifted it to its hive, woke from its calm And stung its puny life into my hand. It took Seidel 17 years to produce another collection, Sunrise, and though many of the poems remain under the influence of Lowellian anxiety, the distinctively sui-Seidel note (to borrow a pun from the poet himself) is audible for the first time: It was autumn. It ...”

“... nature of Ellroy’s compulsions and the pop-cultural ubiquity of his obsessions that it took me at least 200 pages of my second pass at American Tabloid before I recalled having read it at all. Anyway, so far as I can see, only a reader with National Enquirer levels of credulousness would willingly subject himself to the relentless strafing of ...”

“... The only public figure to denounce capitalism in the past 25 years, Hobsbawm claims, was Pope John Paul II. All the same, another couple of decades later, the fainthearted witnessed a system so exultant and impregnable that it only just managed to keep the cash machines open on the high streets. Eric Hobsbawm, who was born in the year of the Bolshevik ...”

“... state of constitutional anarchy’. ‘It really is time,’ he urged, ‘that we in this country took our constitution seriously.’ All too often, Wilberforce complained, Britain muddled through in constitutional matters ‘with a fuzzy kind of reliance upon convention’. Devolution, he feared, might throw up issues that were less easily settled, and he ...”

“... and largely persisted until very recently, when geological exploration by Jelle de Boer and John Hale revealed two major faultlines under the shrine, together with the presence of ethylene gas. Not only was the bituminous limestone sufficiently fissured to allow the gas to rise to the surface through the Kassotis spring water (which the Pythia ...”

“... are alleged to belong to the ancient Sabean sect whose worshippers give primacy as a prophet to John the Baptist. Depending on the nature of what they are asked to do, I’m told, witches and sorcerers charge at least $400 for a spell or a curse, though the better-known ones can command up to $6000. Spells relate to marriage, love, divorce, good health, job ...”

“... Being​ much plagued by insomnia, some years ago I took to reading, as I tried to drift off to sleep, a collection of dialogues recovered from the flight recorders of crashed aeroplanes. These transcripts, rendered on the page in conventional dramatic format, followed a uniform narrative arc: a mishmash of cockpit directions, communication with air traffic control, and with passengers and stewardesses, banal chit-chat about family or food (Krispy Kreme donuts seem to be a favourite of US pilots) suddenly giving way to concern about an unexpected bang or shudder or an unresponsive flap or lever; rapidly escalating to blind panic as the situation turns critical; then, inevitably, the same denouement ...”

“... Back-Bone of an Eel’. And then the rabbits began to appear.A local apothecary and obstetrician, John Howard, was the first person outside her immediate circle to examine Toft. He said he felt something ‘leaping’ in her womb. Under his supervision in Guildford, she went on to deliver a large number of dead rabbits, nine in a single day. Howard wrote ...”

“... but the arguments that got us there were mostly neoliberal ones. Reformers said that non-smokers took fewer sick days, fewer breaks; they rarely referred to smoking as a public health problem that might have something to do with class and racial inequality, lack of education, or unemployment. Yielding to or breaking the smoking habit was all about ...”

“... soon veered towards compassion: ‘Du Maurier book upsets family and friends’. But most people took sides. Things came to a head after a programme about du Maurier on TV, called The Loving Heart after one of her novels. It was unremarkable in itself but several of the participants got wound up into declaring afterwards that they hadn’t said she ...”