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“... life. ‘The sale of five cattle is starting right now in ring number one,’ the voice said. A black heifer was padding around the ring, its hoofs slipping in sawdust and shit, and the man in charge of the gate, whose overalls were similarly caked, regularly patted it on the rump to keep it moving. Farmers in wellington boots and green waxed jackets hung ...”

“... the speakers do not listen to one another. Of the art of Ford’s friend and collaborator, Conrad, Ian Watt writes in his recent book on that writer’s 19th-century texts: ‘The need to derive moral meaning from physical sensation partly arises from the fact that both the impressionists and the symbolists ... proscribed any analysis, prejudgment, or ...”

“... off the west of Ireland. A fair number of Scots manned the ship during the closing months of 1940: Ian Affleck used to work in Kalac’s Cycle and Motor Store in Forfar, and felt he’d been born to help power a ship such as this, named after his own town. Angus McInnes’s father had been a fisherman on the Isle of Harris; Angus had sailed with Forfar since ...”

“... where the old aristocracy mixed with the new celebrity. Princess Margaret met Lucian Freud and Ian Fleming; Tennant’s previous girlfriend, Ivy Nicholson, became part of Andy Warhol’s Factory, and Jeanne Campbell, the daughter of the 11th duke of Argyll, went on to have an affair with Fidel Castro. Anne and Colin got engaged. Her father was annoyed ...”

“... postwar period’, and adducing his love of American jazz and his hero-worship of Louis Armstrong. Black musicians, somewhat ironically, are the crucial link between Larkin and his mother in ‘Reference Back’, which beautifully describes the ‘unsatisfactory’ nature of his relationship with her (the word occurs four times), as well as the bond that ...”

“... for their gaunt and bitter aspect, maimed and bemedalled, roll out a banner, bordered in black crêpe, Thiepval 1916 it reads. So comfortably remote, remoter even than the ‘relief of Derry’ [in 1689] they are celebrating. Silently, humorously, doggedly, they mass around a dripping platform, a remarkable feudal, patriarchal, tribal, historical ...”

“... Johnson, who ran a series of newspaper ads that portrayed the tax as an attack on ‘the entire black community’: Unlike most white Americans, many African Americans who accumulated wealth did so facing race discrimination in education, employment, access to capital, and equal access to government resources. In many cases, race discrimination was ...”

“... was also a second song, a ghostly number about Saddleworth Moor and the murders of children by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, a song which seemed to bring place and personality together in a way that nobody had done in British pop before. Morrissey and Marr were a couple of arch-fans, a conglomeration of good influences and proper hungers, and their band, The ...”

“... he wanted someone to cook him his lunch.Over these years he met his literary heroes Hemingway, Ian Fleming and C.S. Forester, and tried, with the encouragement of Forester, to kick-start his own automatic grammatisator and sell stories to periodicals. In the short stories from the mid-1950s he got onto the marketable trick of embedding tropes from genre ...”

“... handicap of six makes him superior to other obsessive literary golfers such as P.G. Wodehouse and Ian Fleming, and only a little inferior to Malcolm Lowry and Patrick Hamilton, who were golfers as well as drinkers of championship class. This devotion to sport went with a declared aversion to women and, at this stage, to sex in any form. He told Carpenter in ...”

“... about kings and queens is as voracious as ever. In the past couple of decades authors such as Ian Mortimer and Alison Weir have been bashing out books at a furious pace, including The Perfect King (yes, it was Edward III) and Queens of the Age of Chivalry. In the last few years, publishers have jumped on the Game of Thrones bandwagon, peddling titles such ...”

“... saw around him capitalism’s monstrous waste of human potential. As Reid would put it, see the Ian Rankin living up that stair who will never write a novel, the Menuhin in the next tenement who will never hold a violin, the Chloe Kelly in that council block who will never hear the roar as she slams a ball into an open goal. For Reid, fairness would only ...”

“... they can’t get on with them. (I first came across this crack in a biography of the womanising Ian Fleming, who knew and cordially loathed Freud – who loathed him back.) François Mauriac, in his great novel of literary envy, Ce qui était perdu, puts it more subtly and tellingly: ‘The more women a man knows, the more rudimentary becomes the idea he ...”

“... Updike foresaw that he might become a victim of typecasting, tagged as an exhibit. In a letter to Ian McEwan in 2005, he mused: ‘It occurs to me that since you interviewed me that first time in a BBC studio you have risen to be generally called the best novelist of your generation whereas I have fallen to the status of an elderly duffer whose tales of ...”

“... remarkable. Ask who the leading young British novelists are and you may well be told Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, William Boyd, Julian Barnes. Given that writers typically have long careers and get better with age, ‘young’ is not entirely a misnomer applied here. Like politicians, novelists can be youthful long after the point at which the careers of athletes ...”