“... were indications, sounds and airs, that the black magic of the Mafia was known to the island. Paul Castellano was a Staten Island householder who can rarely have set foot on the ferry and who was eventually to stay at home, save for the occasional progress by limousine across the bridge. The mansion he lived in, nicknamed the White House, stood on top of ...”

“... Comedy is the disguised priest who weds every couple, the German writer Jean Paul Richter said, and in the English novel the greatest of all disguised priests, the comic celebrant of happy unions, is Jane Austen. For the puff of marital harmony that ends every one of her books, among other things, Austen’s comedy began to be called ‘Shakespearean’ soon after her death ...”

“... face or body: lovers of the ‘characteristic’ answer that such perfection has more to do with geometry than with human charm. Their watchword is Bacon’s famous aphorism: ‘there is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.’ The opposition of classic to characteristic also leads naturally to the connection between ...”

“... third most written about person in the ‘LRB’ archive, after Shakespeare and Freud. Here Karl Miller’s memories of the paper in her day are accompanied by extracts from some of the pieces published at the time. On the morning Margaret Thatcher’s death was announced, the lesser lights of television who were minding the shop did her proud. A river of ...”

“... field, after the recent defeat of Albania at Wembley, when he was disparaging the contribution of Paul Gascoigne, who had come on late in the game to score one goal and make another – admittedly against a beaten side: Gascoigne had been disobedient and had wandered about. Robson seems to like the player, who started out, as he did himself, in the ...”

“... the ways in which consciousness multiplies itself. Normal and indeed fascinating. Both Karl Miller and Jeremy Hawthorn consider as one of their classic texts Conrad’s short story ‘The Secret Sharer’. Suggested by the concealment of a fugitive which actually took place on board the clipper ship Cutty Sark, the tale is of a young mate accused of ...”

“... takes an inordinately long time about it. Fanatics such as myself – and there is nothing you can do about it once you have caught the cricket bug, it eats away at your better judgment for the whole of the rest of your life – reply that the dreariest parts of the game are often the most intriguing. The hypnosis which the game works on us comes from the ...”

“... had been inspired by the careers of Jimmy Boyle, John McVicar, ‘Dirty Den’ of EastEnders, and Paul Barber, one of the ‘Brothers McGregor’ who also spent some time inside, and who recently claimed in the Sun: ‘Jailed turned me into a star.’ Burglary, theft, blackmail, arson, extortion, violence – including rape – have become socially ...”

“... to deliver it, or that romance stands in an antithetical, a wishful relation to what human beings do, and to their reasons for doing it. But Lennon’s fate is far from proving that romance never makes anything happen, and cannot explain what does happen. I am writing here about the Lennon made public in his art and sayings. I am romanticising him. I am not ...”

“... I got​ to know Karl Miller in the 1960s, when I was in my mid-twenties and he was in his early thirties. He was the literary editor of the New Statesman and I was a junior editor – ‘a young editor here’, my boss used to say – at Faber and Faber. I didn’t know him well – a friend of mine, Francis Hope, was his assistant – but I talked to him at parties and once or twice I had lunch with him (I remember being told to eat my meat ...”

“... disease, in Ivan Vaughan’s book, becomes a fascinating, even thrilling experience. Jonathan Miller talks in his introduction of Ivan ‘surmounting his disease by regarding it as a treasured possession and not just as an abominable affliction’, and that is exactly right. The experience of the disease becomes a voyage of discovery – about the disease ...”

“... and its Intelligence knew what they were doing and connived at it. Proof of that came from Sir Hal Miller MP, a Tory grandee, who told the House of Commons that he had cleared the Walter Somers manufacture of Saddam’s Supergun with three different arms of government. When the prosecutions were dropped, a subversive cartoon circulated round HM Customs showing ...”

“... Japanese banks, would be able to undercut US banks by offering loans at lower rates of interest. Paul Volcker, then chair of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve, was given the task of negotiating international capital requirements. At a private dinner in London in September 1986 with Robin Leigh-Pemberton, governor of the Bank of England, and three ...”

“... ways. He wrote and sold 19 stories and seemed set to stay. Indeed, he might have done well to do so. But he was back by the end of the year and living with Nell in London. They were married two years later. The marriage, which must have been hellish for both of them, is not discussed here, though Nell has fits, head swellings, blood spittings, lung ...”

“... television) when Scotland met England in a contest which turned out temperate enough and which I’d claim, through my kilt, that Scotland were unlucky to lose. A Scottish forward wandered offside at a drop-out: together with an easy penalty kick that was missed, this small technical infringement gave away the points that made the difference between the ...”