“... governess, Miss Tink. Miss Tink, for all the monosyllabic innocence of her name, had a bad cousin, John, who may well also have influenced the child Borges, because he was one of the street-corner ‘hoodlums’ who later fascinated him, partly for being so brave as well as bad, when they fought, and partly because he saw them as ideal compendia of the local ...”

“... the capitals of Europe. When I took on these attitudes I was writing a book full of admiration for John Clare as a local poet, and I was learning to admire Constable as, principally, a local painter. But to be modern was to be metropolitan; and to be a ‘local’ anything in the 1960s, even for musicians in Liverpool, was to have missed the bus to London. So ...”

“... Clearly, the latter, though they are one to whom everyone is keen to pretend to defer. When John Reid, the health secretary, was discussing his reasons for not wanting to ban smoking in public places, he said he ‘worried about the unanimity of middle-class health professionals’ on this issue, and wondered what other sources of pleasure were ...”

“... which comes out too in his treatment of Blunt, Burgess, Driberg, and a civil servant called John Cairncross. All these geese become swans in Pincher’s skilled hands. How unfair to suggest that they were small fry, dilettanti, wartime temporary agents or upper-class decadents. Blunt, in particular, he praises as an agent of a supreme professionalism ...”

“... In the London Review of Books, John Maynard Smith said about scientists: ‘however interested they may be in politics or history or philosophy, their first love is science itself.’ If only I could follow this bent, and tell something of Hamilton as a mathematician. As it happens, he also wrote a good deal of poetry, but his poems lack the magic of his equations, which seem more beautiful and moving now than when they were imagined 150 years ago ...”

“... of Liston and Ali on encountering the Beatles. The Louisville Lip engaged in cool banter with John and Ringo. Liston’s reaction, like his boxing style, was rather blunt. ‘Are those the motherfuckers that everyone’s been talking about?’ he asked when he saw them on the Ed Sullivan Show. ‘My dog plays drums better than the kid with the big ...”

“... And, one mutters, reviewers carp. For all this, Taylor has a critical parti pris. Like John Carey, whom he admires, he subscribes to the simplifying (and Ray-reversing) view that Thackeray is a one-book author. Or, as Carey brutally puts it: ‘Thackeray’s career as a leading novelist began and ended with Vanity Fair. After that it was downhill ...”

“... God, here I am, hungover inside the little café near the markets, jittery, scribbling a babble of sentimental language in my purple notebook emotion container – no, buy some strawberries (fruit market) in the sun from the old Italian women who mutter ‘Thank you, signora, it’s a pleasure to serve even a rich and impious Anglo lady such as yourself, take another punnet, our brothers take precedence in our father’s will, but we’re content with that ...”

“... When statistics start horning in on our language, or the way we use it, the results are seldom quite what we’d be happy to hear. To be told that, day in, day out, we rely on some wretchedly skimpy proportion, a bare few thousand, of the uncommonly luxuriant word-hoard available to us anglophones, is chastening, leading us at best into sporadic efforts to stretch our working vocabularies by bringing into play delightful words we’ve always known but have somehow never got around to airing in public ...”

“... 3. Night Recall Station Road: typed in darkness Walwalinj silhouette blown sharp          flooded gum overhang a blackly sparkling canker, short shirted birdcall in damp,                     like running the car slow along Station Road to complete a second program, to rebus and whorl the Cross Road unlocking, road driven like an arched back under which all is hollow, the sound of the cavernous even where the ground is low and saline, she-oak huddle brushing silver magneto, sand and gravel dust kicked out of the rain paste, yes, like water rushing, exhumation of subterranean fractals, wheel ruts filled with rocks, wagon flashbacks, axle through thirteen separate land titles, striking wrong keys like totems not belonging to you, knowing after type is hot set there’s no going back, harvester still perched on rose quartz outcrop,                          tilted away from the sun of pinpointing shadow from fence to shaft,           glow through sustain plasticated Elders For Sale sign anaphoric round boundaries, sober post-restraint            up to salmon gum canopy, cavernous ride through cresting fallaways of ploughing or straight-in seeding, no mucking around, stubble misses like wire bristles so sharply upright, inevitable given data to start with, no accidental imply or implore, well water table hillock osmotically stonewalled or inclined, thick in the throat like spout or distended gullet,                     regurgitating, reflexing sheep picking over red dirt first green carpeting salutations against perfectly stacked hay world, samphire offshoots so sharp with finches still opposite thinning ‘rabbit bush’, Needlings backbone hanging there against gunshot, crossover anatomies hoeing desiccated structure against rain, in shed of pitch and tar, fire roll to circular breaks a holding-off of paranoid potentials,                     slick movements of nomadism, introduced weeds, burrs carted across property on ignorant hobnailed boots prised souls mis-striking wheat no-sprouted, lassitude of foliated salt patch hard on all families, sure, but high on Station Road they sell well at the expense of the low ...”

“... O nobly-born, listen. Now thou art experiencing the Radiance of the Clear Light of Pure Reality. Recognise it. O nobly-born, thy present intellect, in real nature void, not formed into anything as regards characteristics or colour, naturally void, is the very Reality, the All-Good. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, tr. W.Y. Evans-Wentz I Scotlandwell All summer long, I waited for the night to drive out in the unexpected gold of beechwoods, and those lighted homesteads, set like kindling in the crease-lines of the dark, catching a glimpse, from the road, of huddled dogs and sleepless cattle, mustered in a yard as one flesh, heads like lanterns, swaying, full of muddled light; light from the houses television blue, a constant flicker, like the run of thought that keeps us from ourselves, although it seems to kindle us, and make us plausible: creatures of habit, ready to click into motion ...”

“... Emma, what’s wrong with America is (hilariously): ‘Not enough gun control.’ For Marvin – a John Bircher and addict of Rush Limbaugh slob conservatism – what’s wrong with America is ‘coloureds and hispanics’ (the Jews he can live with, since ‘they only sell drugs and prostitutes in the coloured districts’). Marvin built the best fall-out ...”

“... to marry her, including Leland Hayward, the agent and producer, and she had been nearly raped by John Barrymore, according to whom she had backed away against the wall of his dressing-room stammering: ‘No, no, my father doesn’t want me to have babies.’ Her mother, after all, apart from her social grandeur, was a serious and distinguished pioneer in the ...”

“... in a company of about 198,000,’ Edwardes writes: his secretary, his personal assistant and John McKay, the communications director, all of whom had moved across from Chloride with the boss. It was some time before we hacks cottoned on to the fact that McKay was not an industrial public relations man in the surprisingly thoughtful mould of the motor ...”

“... Dickens – who can tell what the unconscious of that great novelist may have got up to? – made John Jasper more in love with Edwin than he is with Rosa. I also much enjoyed the essay on Lady Morgan, known as ‘Glorvina’ and author of The Wild Irish Girl (the title is ironic – the girl was an animated and cultivated bluestocking), and its guess that ...”