“... not to be confused with a novel of the same title by Anita Brookner). In the earlier book Michael Cullen left working-class Nottingham for the metropolis, fell into the proverbial bad company, and ended up as a convicted gold-smuggler. Now, having been abandoned by his wife after ten years of idleness in the Cambridgeshire village of Upper Mayhem, he ...”

“... was plucked from the Marines to serve on the National Security Council, which is attached to the White House. This was, North is too shy to tell us, a political appointment. The Colonel was chosen because of his right-wing views, which were bolstered, as were the President’s, by fanatical born-again Christianity. North worked closely and happily under ...”

“... eventually succumbing to drug addiction, is an insistent presence in her work. Poems such as ‘White Phosphorus’ (1988), though written some years later, resound with atrocities witnessed and committed:‘And when he came back’  ‘from Nam’  ‘at first’  ‘he wanted’  ‘to go back’‘back there, was it where’  ‘he belonged ...”

“... Such arduous processes were nonetheless used to produce vast quantities of text. The late Michael Clanchy estimated that the English royal government put out around thirty thousand documents a year as early as the second half of the 12th century. Using the ingenious method of calculating the expenditure on the wax used to seal documents, Clanchy found ...”

“... by Alan Walker.* I was also reading – for amusement – the biography of Lytton Strachey by Michael Holroyd and one of Dorothy Parker by Marion Meade. In Holroyd’s book, I was most struck by some portraits – reproduced in full colour – that had been done of Strachey; there’s one by Simon Bussy, drawn in 1904 (the year of Isherwood’s ...”

“... The grisliest scene in Reservoir Dogs concerns the torture of a policeman by Mr Blonde, played by Michael Madsen. The violence is funny, but it’s also hair-raising, haunting in insidious ways, not like the thuggishness of the moment I mentioned in Pulp Fiction. ‘I don’t know anything!’ the policeman says. ‘You can torture me if you want ...”

“... covering of flesh was so transmuted with ecstasy that early passion became a heavenly embrace of white fiery flame. There are joys so complete, so all perfect, that one should not survive them. Ah why did not my burning soul find exit that night, and fly, like Blake’s angel, through the clouds of our earth to another sphere? These alarming words helped to ...”

“... off by the Ukip MEP Godfrey Bloom for not cleaning behind the fridge), and not all of us were white: demographically unpromising candidates for membership in a party which is anyway tiny – an order of magnitude smaller than Labour or the Tories, its membership amounts to 0.06 per cent of the electorate. The amateur Ukip enthusiast may have meant only ...”

“... created one about Rhys. Postures: Jean Rhys in the Modern World, recently on display at London’s Michael Werner Gallery, does not try to cover all Rhys’s glimmers in and out of vivacity. Nevertheless there is a spectral quality to this ‘collective portrait’, which includes no actual portrait of Rhys herself. Paintings, sculptures, photographs – and ...”

“... had bred 2123 dogs and owned 2696.They are often like this, the ‘Doggy People’ who feature in Michael Worboys’s study of twenty ‘eminent and not so eminent Victorians who were the modern dog’s makers’: muscular, energetic, eccentric, polymathic. Kathleen Pelham-Clinton, the Duchess of Newcastle, who imported the borzoi breed from Russia into ...”

“... had been got up to look like a charity case, or a Wanted poster. Dead or alive. ‘Vote Michael Moorcock’, it said. ‘King of the City’. King of the City, a hefty London novel, character-packed, busy with competing narratives (confessing, denouncing, celebrating, plea-bargaining for its own sanity), was being punted by its publicists as ‘the ...”

“... in Britain that he is articulating, or to underestimate the support he is drawing from many white-collar workers, pensioners, unemployed and others, who feel that he at least is taking on Mrs Thatcher in a way that nobody else is. Two statistics reveal a lot about Mrs Thatcher’s Britain. One is the unemployment rate, which has more than doubled since ...”

“... Australia’s most celebrated historian, Manning Clark, and its most celebrated writer, Patrick White. A new bitterness, of the kind that divided Britain over Suez and the United States over Vietnam, now split Australia. That Whitlam had greatly contributed to his own destruction by his indifference to economic reality – the oil price rise came soon after ...”

“... to fight his closed-shop policy got branded as Communists. He helped set JFK on his path to the White House, and he got quite cross when Attorney-General Bobby, whose father Joe had been a rival bootlegger in the Thirties, started to hound him. Connoisseurs still marvel at the brazen way he outmanoeuvred the law. The day the game was finally up, he had his ...”

“... stupidly discover, is their terrible lack of each other. Lottie paints her handsome house white all over, goes to Paris, sees old friends, gets entangled with a florid (and as it turns out kooky) Swiss tycoon. Harold retreats to Bournemouth, stares at the sea, meets an art student, takes her to Paris, falls out with her, stays on alone, and comes back ...”