“... better or worse than any other grower.On water they are ahead. Their produce is grown on blocks of rock wool about a metre off the ground; surplus water drains into long trays underneath the blocks and from there it’s borne off to the lagoons, along with rainwater off the roofs, to be pumped around again. The company’s energy strategy is imaginatively ...”

“... and despite her huge popularity with general readers – her 1931 novel Shadows on the Rock was the most widely read book in the United States in the year following its publication – even such serious-minded critics as Edmund Wilson and the young Lionel Trilling regularly disparaged her as spinsterish, middlebrow and reactionary: a kind of ...”

“... And of songs: ‘David of the White Rock’, the ‘Summer Song’ so soft, and that Beautiful tune to which roguish words by Welsh pit boys Are sung – but never more beautiful than here under the ...”

“... bogeyman years, regularly invoked by politicians of all parties as the nadir of postwar Britain. David Cameron (though it could just as easily have been Gordon Brown) read out the charge sheet at a Demos meeting in 2006: ‘economic decline . . . inflation, stagnation and rising unemployment . . . deteriorating industrial relations’. Nearly 30 million ...”

“... in literary limbo. Her rediscovery came in 1977. Two influential fans, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, named her as their ‘most underrated author’ in the TLS and she was taken up in a flurry of publicity, interviewed on radio and TV. Quartet in Autumn, the novel she had on the stocks, was subsequently shortlisted for the Booker prize and new ...”

“... the point of all this sport-watching? What is it for? I even had a title, drawn from a remark David Sexton, the literary editor of the Evening Standard, once made to me. ‘I’m not interested in sport,’ he said, ‘but I often wish I were, given that the mind is always in pain.’ The mind is always in pain … Yes, given that, you can easily see why ...”

“... way Heller laboured to make Something Happened big. Repeating the big success was the Sisyphean rock assigned to Heller and other one-book wonders. How do you follow something that seizes the public imagination like Gone with the Wind, The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Invisible Man or Heller’s own antic masterpiece about the world’s ...”

“... The face on the Carcanet cover is a deeply scored calligraphy of experience, framed by rock-starish lightly silvered hair and reflective shades, behind which eyes that miss nothing flick from side to side, tracking through the exploitable sets of a working life: railside Illinois, Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, Black Mountain College in ...”

“... themselves fêted as bearers of a tradition that for decades had seemed moribund and despised. David Craig, then a Marxist literary critic studying in Cambridge, went to Edinburgh to do some research in the early 1960s. He told Neat that ‘song was in the air, and the influence of Hamish everywhere apparent.’ Robertson and Jimmy MacBeath were among the ...”

“... to ‘a crêpe flipped in the pan’, an image that shrinks and sweetens a piece of lifeless rock. Yet the stove-side manoeuvre described would be as hard to bring off in the world of the book (the off-world of the book) as a spacewalk. It’s as if basic literary mechanisms too are subject to the changed conditions of microgravity, so that the tenor and ...”

“... you are. The Little Flower, she of the astonishing self-love? Hildegard of Bingen, glowing like rock crystal, or Simone Weil, picking herself like a scab? Teresa of Avila, a chilly forehead and a warm thigh, or St Simeon, being written by the tip of his stylus? You may prefer Marguerite Porete, burning alive with her book, or the rich black intersection of ...”

“... centre’ concerned with the local history of immigration. Above the tiny synagogue is the room of David Rodinsky, a Polish Jew of increasingly mysterious reputation. Latterly described as a translator and philosopher, he is said to have lived here in some sort of caretaking capacity. One day in the Sixties Rodinsky stepped out into Princelet Street and ...”

“... himself as a kind of brand-name or designer label, which could be attached to gallery art, film, rock music, light shows and books, eventually extending the ‘franchise’ to include magazines, Polaroid photographs, TV talk shows and other appearances. In his Dazed and Confused interview, Damien Hirst talks about his interest in designing billboards and his ...”

“... to expand his portfolio of North American newspapers, acting in concert with his close associate David Radler, whose sincerely expressed view was that the ideal newspaper consisted of ‘a three-man newsroom – one journalist and two advertising salesmen’. Sackings, cuts, and fines for wasting paper and pencils might not sound like a recipe for brilliant ...”

“... while the new houses in Greenwich and Blackheath appear to have been hipper and more rarefied. Rock musicians were moving there in the late 1960s, along with architects, academics, Labour politicians, and radio and TV presenters. The housing in Blackheath and Greenwich isn’t revolutionary, but it is attractive, and sometimes engages in an obvious way ...”