“... chorister-hero making his high pure etherial and childish music in ‘the Cathedral Basilica of St George at Coverley, the mother church of all England and of the English Empire overseas’ – on the site of Cowley Motor Works, presumably, just outside Oxford. And when, in the last movement of the book, Hubert’s father takes him by high-speed viaducted ...”

“... twinning us with Croydon. No longer is the innocence of G. Davis affirmed in large white letters. George is certainly not OK. The obituaries are in for a life of bad timing: he was caught at the wheel of a getaway van outside the Bank of Cyprus on the Seven Sisters Road in Holloway, 16 months after his release by the home secretary on the grounds that his ...”

“... were trapped’. ‘I have two minor questions,’ she wrote. As usual, they have to do with my George Washington-handicap. I can’t tell a lie even for art, apparently; it takes an awful effort or a sudden jolt to make me alter facts. Shouldn’t it be a lobster town, and further on – where the bait, fish for bait, was trapped – (this is trivial, I ...”

“... mansion. The Clyde rises and falls only a few yards from the castle’s back door, and in 1668 Sir George Maxwell sold eighteen acres of riparian land to the city of Glasgow, which thought it was a useful site for a harbour. Shoals and shallows above that point in the river made Glasgow inaccessible to sea-going ships; they usually transferred their cargoes at ...”

“... teacher and speaker; stylist and rhetorician; lyricist and word-artist; translator and linguist; painter and botanist. For Luxemburg, letter writing was a daily task (there are 2350 letters in the first five volumes of the Gesammelte Briefe). It was, one feels reading this collection, the way she spoke to others and to herself. She was also a ...”

“... jerks’, joining notorious loudmouths of the era such as the New York Yankees’ bullying owner George Steinbrenner (another Roy Cohn client). From the Bronx to the Battery, opinion on Trump set as hard as the cement on his construction sites and as fast as he had ordered underpaid Polish immigrant construction workers in 1980 to jackhammer the Art Deco ...”

“... pardons the renegade. In 2003 Lenny Bruce received a posthumous pardon for his conviction from George Pataki, then governor of New York. And in 2005 the Library of America started publishing Roth’s work in a uniform edition. It wasn’t the first time a living author’s work had been honoured in this way: Eudora Welty and Saul Bellow went before ...”