“... his name and wrote ‘Robert’ while telling him to keep up the good work. His form teacher, Mr Norman, said that ‘Ronnie’s attitude and standard of work is slipping. I hope that he takes note of what has been said to him recently. He is always pleasant and happy.’ Ronnie seemed like a person ready for the world outside and he left school as soon as ...”

“... All of which went against my sculptural instincts, I suppose. And it was just a shambles on the page. He didn’t seem to care what he published – the act of publication was no longer invested for him with any momentousness. Before, with Life Studies, what I liked about him was the spareness, or what seemed spareness to me then. In fact Life Studies was ...”

“... the ‘pornography of despair’, art-internationalism, on Serota and Saatchi and Norman Rosenthal and the Turner Prize, on new hyped foreign painting (Schnabel and the Italian Transavantgardia), on the so-called ‘Neo-Geo’ movement from New York (being collected by Saatchi), on the British ‘new object’ sculptors (also collected by ...”

“... walls of the dining-room: Harold Wilson, Derek Nimmo, David Steel, Jeremy Irons, Clement Freud, Norman Tebbit, Barbara Castle, Elaine Paige, Cecil Parkinson, Nigel Lawson, Robin Day. It’s like being compulsorily inducted into a dinner party from hell, a nightmare mix of half-forgotten careerists and political dinosaurs who can’t switch off. But ...”

“... side, there are limits to local supply – the efforts of Conor Cruise O’Brien, Paul Johnson or Norman Stone, however infallible, will only go so far; while on the other, the lights of the New Criterion or Public Interest shine brighter in the reputable British mirror than they do more nakedly at home. The result is a formula that makes for a livelier ...”

“... the one hand towards a traditionalist ‘vernacular’ or, on the other, towards the High-Tech of Norman Foster and Richard Rogers. Much of the interest comes from unexpected details. In the section on ‘Energy’, for instance, the account of Sylvia Crowe’s landscaping of the grounds of nuclear power stations is an insight into the way that even the most ...”

“... for the ferry across the Styx’ – but he was present at the notorious occasion in 1960 when Norman Mailer stabbed his wife. His name appeared on a guest list published in the newspapers, and Schwartz considered the possibility that the whole thing ‘may have been – probably was – a set-up’, part of an attempt by Mailer to humiliate ...”

“... stolen and cloned by hackers. Currently, the data on my chip are the same as on the front inside page of the passport: first name, family name, date of birth, sex, nationality, document serial number, issuing state, expiry date – a coupling of me with the authority of the state that confirms this is me. The e-passport also contains a digital copy of the ...”

“... brilliant criminal and the subject of one of the great pieces of modern American writing, Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. Gilmore forswore further appeals and faced the firing squad wearing his famously indestructible Timex watch: scarcely typical and followed by a mere trickle of other deaths. There were no executions in 1978 or 1980, one ...”

“... book with the key to the code (free, but with a ‘printing charge’ of one dollar); but the page-references in the code book make no sense without a master code book (delivery charge: two dollars); variables in the code depend on whether the horse is a filly, but to find that out you need something called a Breeder’s Guide (Groucho: ‘Where can I get ...”

“... Minister) and he uses the word ‘secret’ obsessively in Crusoe (it occurs five times on one page). Novak sees his experience of prison and the survival strategies to which it led as crucial to his personality, commenting that he was to be imprisoned several more times during his life but ‘it never ceased to be the nightmare that haunted his ...”

“... a change of climate and fresh air and exercise. Williamson’s footnote for this points us to page 50 of Maria Esther Vázquez’s Borges: Esplendor y Derrota (1996). Vázquez had known Borges well, but this is no excuse for her account of the aftermath of his visit to the brothel: ‘He had such a terrible crisis that he cried for three successive ...”

“... woman to man’. It encountered fierce criticism. The chief rabbi wrote to the health secretary, Norman Fowler: ‘Say plainly: Aids is the consequence of marital infidelity, premarital adventures, sexual deviation and social irresponsibility.’ Fowler later remembered that Margaret Thatcher’s ‘initial instinct was that this was not a big problem, and ...”

“... not where it should be,’ he kept saying. We eventually found the church, which had a Norman nave and was therefore unlikely to have moved since the Ordnance Survey landed its symbol on the Landranger map.Thinking back on this, I wonder whether my father was already in the early stages of dementia. He was only in his mid-fifties, and it was a ...”

“... the terse two paragraphs granted the subject in Osman’s Dream, Caroline Finkel’s massive 550-page history of the Ottoman Empire published in 2006, we read that ‘terrible massacres took place on both sides.’ As for genocide, the very word is a misfortune, which not only ‘bedevils any wider understanding of the history of the fate of Ottoman ...”