“... Many years later, in the ‘worn memorial’ of the Baker Street buffet under Chiltern Court, John Betjeman sought inspiration for his poem ‘The Metropolitan Railway’, with its opening invocation: ‘Early Electric! With what radiant hope/Men formed this many-branched electrolier’. A stained glass windmill and ‘sepia views of leafy lanes in ...”

“... that I was doing anything but trying to make people laugh when I threw my custard pies and took my pratfalls,’ Keaton said, but he starred in Beckett’s movie Film (1965) nevertheless. For his part, in 1956, Lahr debuted Beckett’s Waiting for Godot on Broadway.In the spectacle they made of themselves, these clowns brought with them unexamined ...”

“... When John Major ascended to 10 Downing Street, the wits were at first unsure quite how to set about him. There was the obvious, the elementary ‘grey’ approach: the Burton suits, the haircut, the delicious fry-ups and so on. On this reading, Major could be presented as a drearier-than-either cross between James Stewart and J ...”

“... cracked, does not tell the truth’ – and the resulting distortions are, in a sense, John Wilson Foster’s subject in his impressive new scrutiny of the revival era (roughly the period between 1890 and the early 1930s). The word ‘fictions’ in Foster’s title denotes both fictional themes and concomitant misbeliefs: for example, about the ...”

“... asked for five dollars by four black teenagers answered that he indeed had something for them, took out a handgun and proceeded to blast away, wounding three and leaving one crippled for life. His main defence was that he was threatened by the look in their eyes. (‘What was that look? ... Hunter! ... Predator!’) All this was horrific enough, but the ...”

“... the Alamein dinner, to which I looked forward with keener and keener anticipation. Indeed, like John Osborne waiting for Max Miller to come on stage in whatever provincial repertory theatre it was that he had sought him out, I found that I began to laugh before the Field-Marshal rose to speak and that while he was speaking I was reduced to tears by the ...”

“... in an area known as New Town or Mile End, just on the outskirts of Portsmouth where his father, John Dickens, worked in the Naval Pay Office. His mother, Elizabeth, is reported to have claimed that she went to a ball on the night before his birth; but no ball is mentioned in the area for that particular evening and it is likely that this is one of the many ...”

“... correspondence. But most of it has disappeared. The collected letters are excellently edited by N. John Hall, but they run only to a couple of volumes. Dickens, by contrast, looks like amassing 15 or so fatter volumes in the Pilgrim edition. George Eliot’s eight volumes and Thackeray’s four (soon to be supplemented) all outweigh Trollope. There is a ...”

“... the cops had in December consulted a New York psychiatrist called James Brussel, described by John Douglas as ‘the father of behavioural profiling’. Douglas is the FBI man who inspired Thomas Harris to invent the character Jack Crawford in the Hannibal Lecter novels, so he should know. This is the psychological portrait Brussel came up with of the Mad ...”

“... She is talking to Charlotte Lucas when she finds herself ‘suddenly addressed by Mr Darcy who took her so much by surprise in his application for her hand, that, without knowing what she did, she accepted him’. ‘Without knowing what she did’: the narrative behaves as if reporting a fact, but it is inhabiting her consciousness as her instant response ...”

“... did not accuse her spouse of showing off, but his friend Willard Maas remarked that no one took his hysteria, which he produced because he thought it required, very seriously; while Elizabeth he thought disappointed on the occasions Barker returned to her, because it might signal the end of ‘this great martyrdom which brought to her aid half of ...”

“... status of the pig, which it describes as the most useful of all animals to think with, and so I took Allon’s offer as an uncharacteristically elaborate way of introducing his latest thoughts about the relation of pigs and money. But the offer was genuine enough. He had noticed, he explained, that the smell of leather bindings produced in me an invariable ...”

“... wrinkled, was appearing in person. The news was his news: if Ceausescu visited a chicken farm, it took precedence over everything else. On the day of the Armenian earthquake Romanian Television led on a response from President Houphouet-Boigny of the Ivory Coast to a message of congratulations from Our Prince Charming. Ceausescu’s thoughts, displayed by the ...”

“... with helping him make his all-important break from Henry James, noting, enigmatically: ‘It took time and it took blood.’ After the inevitable divorce in 1966, Roth was skewered on ever-mounting alimony payments ($125 a week in 1967) and taunted by Josie’s promise never to remarry and release him. He killed her ...”

“... were not intending to add to it. But they were not to be ignored, in case they became offended and took away what little you had. Something of this is brought out by a cynical text that probably dates from the first millennium BC. It takes the form of a dialogue between a master and his slave. The master feels that his life is pointless, but he comes up with a ...”