“... private life’, the life of a typical bourgeois academic, dividing his time between the lecture hall and the family home. His marriage was happy, and he cherished his only child, a daughter who was profoundly deaf but went on to be a successful artist. He was frugal, temperate and quiet. He was also a vegetarian; Einstein, by contrast, was a full-blooded ...”

“... local specialisms. Birmingham was strong in industrial sociology, and Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall had pioneered cultural studies there. Thirty-odd miles away at Leicester University, Ilya Neustadt and Norbert Elias gave the sociology department a more theoretical and international focus. Evaluation has had the effect of dispersing such centres. A ...”

“... began by acknowledging the ‘curiosity aroused in me by Tennyson’s Maud and Locksley Hall, ostensibly dramatic poems which were strangely flawed, I always felt, by some hidden emotional connection with the poet’s own life. What was it?’ It was, Rader discovered, the steamy psycho-sexual drama of Tennyson’s premarital affair with Rosa ...”

“... of his specimens are lost, and at the start of the novella he has washed up penniless at Bredely Hall, the Gothic mansion of the Rev. Harald Alabaster, a baronet, liberal churchman and anti-Darwinian collector of zoological specimens, who is attempting to write a lengthy vindication of the argument from design. At Bredely he meets Alabaster’s sad and ...”

“... another angle it was the amour fou Fenchurch’s life. Bella was not your Donald McGill, music-hall-joke mother-in-law. Hot Mediterranean blood ran in her veins and she was exotic, at least by Ardsley standards. But she was 34 years older than him (old enough to be his granny), it was Yorkshire, in the Fifties. As well make love to a pit pony and expect ...”

“... into the literary zeitgeist, has, in other words, done its bit to undermine the sloppy, liberty-hall notion of writing that takes it to be something best done uncorseted and to draw attention to the bracing element of the deliberate and the impersonal that firms literature up. Far from wanting to ride with the avant-garde, Oulipians are reactionary in ...”

“... not slandered by this novel. A hundred years ago, Irish politicians routinely took charge of City Hall by street fighting and the power of the fist. The arch-exponent of New York knuckle politics was John Morrisey (1831-78). Born in Tipperary, Morrisey came to New York as an immigrant worker in 1848, fought his way to the ...”

“... everything short of pre-paid order forms. The illuminati have been smuggled into the Index: John Wilkinson, Peter Riley, Drew Milne, Rod Mengham and (of course) J.H. Prynne himself. Prynne and Zappa? Certainly, why not? Ben Watson (the footnotes): ‘When I asked Jeremy Prynne what he thought of Captain Beefheart, he said he thought he sounded like ...”

“... the War against the Hizbullah’. I decided to stick to my job and went straight to the conference hall, leaving the tempting croissants behind. I found myself a good seat, close to the stage but not too close, and felt ready to hear how threatening Ahmadinejad’s shadow was. More and more people crowded in and eventually filled every corner of the ...”

“... the moment when the narrator suggests that the ending of the Odyssey is no ending at all. As Edith Hall writes in The Return of Ulysses, Homer’s story has proved particularly attractive material for a postwar Europe trying to come to terms with the violence of its own history.1 Hans Erich Nossack is just one German writer who made the Odyssey his base for ...”

“... commitment to the army (and, by extension, the nation) in extremis. The final exhibit is John Gilbert’s huge watercolour, The Queen Inspecting Wounded Coldstream Guardsmen in the Hall of Buckingham Palace (1856), at first sight a schmaltzy and fairly undistinguished representation of this unwritten ...”

“... It’s been two years since the last one, so it must be time for a new book of poems by John Ashbery. Like the old James Bond films, Ashbery’s late instalments arrive punctually, and you buy your ticket knowing what to expect: a suave cartoon with ridiculous gadgets, clever one-liners and last-minute escapes. ‘So Long, Santa’, the penultimate poem in Ashbery’s previous collection, A Worldly Country (2007), worried that ‘it will come round again/and we won’t be ready ...”

“... the reverend submitted insurance claims on his nephew to the Beneficial National, the Vulcan, the John Hancock and the World Wide insurance companies. The reverend, who was black, was assisted in his macabre actuarial pursuits, as well as in his legal battles, by a white lawyer called Tom Radney. Exploiting the vulnerabilities of an insurance industry that in ...”

“... he got lost again: ‘As I could not identify any of the offices as yours I hung about in the hall for some time and then decided that you had gone.’ He can’t write enough poetry to make anyone happy. To the publisher John Rodker, who wants to issue a volume of new poems, he confesses sheepishly: ‘I am sorry for ...”

“... Pietro Germi, Anatole Litvak, Jean Painlevé, Gillo Pontecorvo, Nicholas Roeg, George Rouquier, John Schlesinger, Henri Storck, John Sturges and Arne Sucksdorff. And what are we to make of those who are mentioned in the text, but not favoured with individual entries? Pioneers like the Lumière brothers; veterans like ...”