“... is the author of five fantastically entertaining bestselling novels . . . she lives in North London with many, many pairs of shoes.’ A strain of metafictional game-playing runs through Litt’s work. Corpsing (2000), his loose-jointed interpretation of a psychological thriller, turns on a shooting in a Soho restaurant. A crop of documents related ...”

“... which claim to speak directly of the times we live in. ‘The Watering Place’ after Peter Paul Rubens by John Browne (1770) There is, however, nothing irrelevant about the new show at the Royal Academy, featuring Gainsborough, Constable and Turner; not because of anything it has to say about ‘the making of landscape’, but because it is so ...”

“... this novel’, confesses to the source of his title (‘The Rotters’ Club, by Hatfield and the North, released in 1975, is available on Virgin Records’), notes that ‘Section 1 of “The Chick and the Hairy Guy” contains quotations from genuine lonely hearts advertisements in Sounds (1973)’ and Section 3 ‘quotations from the magazines Woman ...”

“... of American Folk Music (1952) drift on the air in the first rooms; in the last, we can hear Paul Bowles’s recordings (1959-61) of traditional Moroccan musicians. Beaubourg’s trophy exhibit is Kerouac’s highway-scroll manuscript of On the Road, composed in 1951: at more than thirty metres, it runs most of the length of the second room, inviting ...”

“... superiors ask him to be the face of a recruitment campaign. But when he is dispatched to his own North London neighbourhood he is forced to confront the reality of his institutional role. On his first day on the beat, the senior officer in the station pointedly refers to the ‘jungle’ out there; later, a series of racist attacks on South Asian shops is ...”

“... In​ 2013, Mark Meadows was a new congressman from North Carolina. He’d owned a restaurant, then worked in real estate, but felt the call to rescue his country from godless socialism. He’d made a promise to his constituents: if they sent him to Washington, he would send ‘Mr Obama home, to Kenya or wherever it is ...”

“... wall paintings featuring miracles from the life of Christ. No other cycle of its kind survives north of the Alps. Hatto also wrote a life of St Verena of Zurzach, an Egyptian woman who accompanied the Theban legion to Europe in the third century and became famous in the Swiss canton of Aargau for the care she gave to girls and lepers. She is often ...”

“... which faces the sea, are obliged to withstand the battering of strong winds blowing from the north-east. At the yellow house live Polly’s Aunt Mary and Aunt Frances, both too religious for their own good – a temperamental defect well understood by Jane Gardam: one is overtaken in the end by vagueness, the other by unaccountable flightiness, after a ...”

“... lives and Protestant beliefs. W.A. Speck and L. Billington in an informative essay on Calvinism in North America, and Herbert Lüthy in a discursive piece on Protestantism and capitalism, note how the specialisations of the recent historiography of Protestantism have divorced theological from social enquiry. The failing is not remedied by the book. There are ...”

“... graduate who turned entryism on its head in fighting the opponents of Reg Prentice in Newham North-East, is a shambles of a book. Paul McCormick is as shrill and manichean as those he fought. He writes like Sapper on an off day: The hall was packed full. And what a horrible sight! There were some terrible faces ...”

“... was the front line, until a generation later, when Hadrian had his wall built a dozen miles to the north. The garrison consisted, not of legionaries, but of auxiliaries, provincial back-up troops, Batavians and Tungrians brought in from the lower Rhine and Maass. It was a remote enough posting. The tablets show officers in touch with colleagues at Carlisle and ...”

“... well known and, at the age of 80, under constant demands for help, he passed his archive to the Paul Mellon Centre in London, which has now published it as this Dictionary, under the editorship of John Ingamells. The Dictionary is unique in its comprehensiveness. No traveller from the British Isles or the British colonies in America who was spotted anywhere ...”

“... did eat it suffered bilious, flatulent attacks. After one meal, the painter and Bauhaus teacher Paul Klee, who prided himself on being a good cook, worried that ‘even his worms would leave him’. The man responsible for the Bauhaus’s garlic problem was the Swiss expressionist painter Johannes Itten, a friend of Alma Mahler who had run a private art ...”

“... attended the University of Naples, and while in the city entered the Dominican Order. He then went north to pursue his studies under Albert the Great, also a Dominican, in Paris and Cologne. He was appointed lecturer and then professor at the University of Paris, but returned to Naples to organise the Dominican house of studies there. He died in 1274 en route ...”

“... to an invisible art manifestation: Lost Memories by Emma Matthews. ‘Very elegant, very Paul Klee,’ the punters say. Rusting English metal, from somewhere down the A13, near Rainham Marshes, rendered as a grid of delicately balanced reds and pinks, with just enough green to cancel the headache. This, so often, is how it works; synergy, they call ...”