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“... in the summer balls of her final year, her last taste of Eden. Andrew, an engineer and semipro rock musician, was initially attracted to Grace because she ‘looked like a person’ (what did he expect – a tomato?). The novel follows a year or so of their courtship, his musical career and her research. Affairs of heart, head and guitar have predictable ...”

“... is cruelty in it.’ At Oxford he made friends with two other able autobiographers, David Thomson, the future BBC producer, and Denis Hills, the African explorer, destined to be rescued by James Callaghan from the clutches of Idi Amin. Michael Wharton spent much of his term-time practising West Riding Knife Throwing with his mates, or drinking ...”

“... because of the portrait of the founder in the entrance hall, ‘the school’s chief financial rock, a fruit importer who had abandoned Presbyterianism for the Church of England when a sudden rise in wealth and status demanded the change’. Even in Saskatchewan the Church of England had a cachet that the others lacked: something to do, perhaps, with the ...”

“... wet-dream – The Martian School, The Metaphor Men. Who are they? Christopher Reid, perhaps? David Sweetman? Norman MacCaig? Philip Larkin? Seamus Heaney, perhaps? Doesn’t Heaney’s description of a lobster –articulated twigs, a rainy stonethe colour of sunk munitions –vie with Raine’sscraping its clawslike someone crouchedto keep wicket at ...”

“... gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster Wallace (b.1962), the previous generation’s experimentalism was as much a way of looking at society as a renovation of novelistic technique. Writers their grouchier teachers viewed as rebarbatively modish or futuristic struck them as fairly ...”

“... and there is even a computer game in which you can play at bashing the British at Canton. Wasn’t David Cameron aware of all this when he arrived in Beijing in November 2010 wearing a Remembrance Day poppy in his buttonhole? Or the right-wing press, when it heaped praise on him for allegedly refusing to remove it when the Chinese asked him? That will have ...”

“... Wilson could imitate his true identity as a bluff, plain-speaking Yorkshireman to perfection. David Cameron once worked for a public relations agency and looks as though he was assembled by one. From Reagan to Schwarzenegger, the line between politics and performance has become increasingly blurred: during the US presidential debates, a soi-disant ...”

“... from the outside is what drives The Picture of Dorian Gray, or Frankenstein, or the films of David Lynch. To watch yourself from outside is, according to the textbook, to watch yourself as dead – and both Hall and his hero understand this all too well. Holed up in his flat, Eric Sanderson reads letter after letter sent to him by ‘the First Eric ...”

“... what amounted to pocket money. (He did better in this respect than the feeble-minded Mr Dick of David Copperfield, who is supplied with pocket money but not allowed to spend it.) Not long after becoming third earl, he fled from home for a brief period in the company of his Swiss valet, though whether this was an abduction or an elopement is hard to say. The ...”

“... to see Satie is not as a classical musician who failed to become a great composer, but as an art-rock star avant la lettre. His career contained all the phases of 1970s art-rock history, though not in the same order: a proggy occult phase, a glam phase, a Bryan Ferryish lounge pop phase, a Brian Enoish ambient phase, a ...”

“... happened next was the first bank run in the UK since the 19th century, the collapse of Northern Rock in September 2007 and its subsequent nationalisation. Northern Rock had an unusual business model in that instead of relying on customer deposits to meet its operational needs it borrowed money short-term on the financial ...”

“... David Gibson was a man stiff and parsonical; by all accounts the sort of man who got things done. You could say he was obsessed with ridding Glasgow of its slums, with turning them into something bright and high and unquestionably modern. That’s what he wanted, and he’d already made vast advances towards getting it when he became convener of Glasgow Corporation’s housing committee in 1964 ...”

“... over his life and over his conduct as a leader of the Revolution, and what is soon evident about David Lawday’s spirited and highly readable biography is that he stands Danton in a flattering light and pays insufficient attention to movements in the shadows. ‘The Gentle Giant of Terror’, the subtitle calls him: which suggests, along with revolutionary ...”

“... of sin. Is this ‘artful whiteface mockery of pious racists’? In his new biography of Wheatley, David Waldstreicher encourages us to think so, and to read the lines in a ‘mocking or satirical instead of a beseeching voice’, so that we can hear Wheatley ‘become the organic intellectual of the enslaved’.The poem shows Wheatley working within narrow ...”

“... some great authority to forbid change in her childhood homeland. The flanks of Penmaen, the ‘Big Rock’, have been thoroughly quarried and the summit (with its ancient fort) has been sliced off. ‘Who was first permitted to start removing this major aspect of the landscape?’ Again, ‘there are high-rise flats on the shores of Anglesey. Who let them do ...”