“... She believed in Stone’s talent from the beginning, read the novels as they were written, and took an active role in the creation of the later books, keeping track of characters, doing research, clarifying plotlines, and in numerous other small ways helping Stone to deliver his novels before his editors lost patience.‘Bob once said, Kesey goes for ...”

“... His books appear to be conceived on the principle laid down by Dr Greenslade at the beginning of John Buchan’s The Three Hostages, as the proper way to write a ‘shocker’: ‘The author writes the story inductively, and the reader follows it deductively ... I begin by fixing on one or two facts which have no obvious connection ... imagine anything you ...”

“... readerships. Thus Ascherson joins the oddly-assorted, lively company of Primo Levi, Oliver Sacks, John Berger, Edward Said and Germaine Greer – but from a slippery starting-point: the journalist is a specialist in nothing. Sometimes he seems to know that only too well, and to underrate his own contribution. Calling for work on the growing power of an ...”

“... to the extra-European and post-colonial world of the 20th century. When Napoleon actually took over from the Directory, however, neither the Parisian têtes pensantes nor anybody else had much clue about this fantastic Pandora’s box. One important point of view – amusingly described by Thom – was that the Corsican chap might turn out like ...”

“... problem worthy of note in Sierra Leone’ and the piece of being ‘poorly researched’. He took Kaplan to be saying that because more and more areas of activity, including military activity, were criminalised, there was no distinguishing political from criminal culture and it troubled him that the political origins of the war in Sierra Leone should be ...”

“... go wrong,’ he said by way of explanation to the equally adamant Menuhin. Gould gave way but it took a fair amount of time to persuade him to cede ‘control’ to someone else. He did the same kind of thing with the pieces and composers he played: only he knew what he was going to play, how it would sound, how fast (or slow) it would be taken. He ...”

“... Europeans on the subject of the American Far West. One of these was deemed so important that Lewis took it with him on the expedition. This was The History of Louisiana – a natural history and topography of the Louisiana Purchase, the better part of what is now the Middle and Far West of the United States – by the French engineer, Antoine Le Page du ...”

“... oiks, like Peter Wright (Bishop’s Stortford High School) and, more recently, David Shayler (John Hampden Grammar, High Wycombe). The latest, Richard Tomlinson, doesn’t quite fit – he got a scholarship from a state primary school to a ‘prestigious public school’. The motives for whistleblowing can be various: high principle, personal ...”

“... an element of explanation to the problem of why it was in England that the Industrial Revolution took place. Clearly pre-industrial England had a relatively rich and sophisticated economy in which the market element was strong enough to cope with basic harvest fluctuations, and which developed a system of public aid capable of carrying the population through ...”

“... with the employers, and they have now been joined by writers of books, who, ten years ago, took on the task, not only of convincing the Government that there should be a PLR system in this country, but also of demonstrating to the Government how to use computer and statistical science to operate it justly. In the course of doing this they discovered ...”

“... strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. It took little time for Edward Young’s fully-formed new sentence, ‘Procrastination is the thief of time’ (1742), to become tomorrow’s proverb. ‘Old soldiers never die’ (Foley, 1920) is undying. ‘The female of the species is more deadly than the ...”

“... is so convincingly specified that it explains the development of others whose treachery took a different form and was therefore known by a different name, if indeed it was classified at all: Bran well Brontë, for example, who had inspired in me nothing but a passing irritation before, but who, I came to think, had so much in common with William ...”

“... macabre. A more recent column shows Marquez feeding not only books but live authors to Castro: he took Graham Greene with him to Havana to meet with the Comandante. In his latest collection of dim-witticisms, Marquez gives rave notices to the spectacle of a tyrant posing for writers as frequently as Napoleon sat for painters: all laurels and a branch of green ...”

“... themselves, or to priests or nurses, while the heroic surgeon sawed on. Half a century ago, John Alfred Ryle, the founder of social medicine, declared that one of the mistakes of scientific medicine was to have shelved the problem of pain. With both clinical and humane ends in mind, he called for fresh study. Since then things have indeed improved, but ...”

“... of letters, when he read his son’s earlier novels; Arthur Waugh, not unlike Isaac D’Israeli, took a quizzical view of his son’s upper-class fantasies.) Brideshead Revisited (hence its appeal to the Americans) is not a picture of what the world is like: rather, a carefully painted canvas of what Waugh would like the world to be like. Again, like ...”