“... and Scotland the more deeply felt his writing becomes. His examination of Northern poets such as David Morley, Simon Armitage and Sean O’Brien is marvellously sensitive to their regionalism and to the bitter undertow of history and class politics in some of their work. I have a grouse about both these books: neither has an index. Also, when reading ...”

“... work with financial bigwigs because they also came from that environment. Peter Orszag, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, William Daley, Michael Froman, Jason Furman and Jack Lew were all finance-to-government mediators of this stamp. Trump, however, gives up all pretence of a distinction between finance and government. A possible reaction is delight, as ...”

“... where he lapsed into a state of knee-knocking shock. Another Englishman, the Lancastrian David Lloyd, was hit a terrifying blow in the groin by Jeff Thomson. The following summer, I too hit him in the same region. I saw him later, ice packs clasped to his nether regions, and asked after his health. ‘After Thommo it were a pleasure,’ he ...”

“... Black, you’re a Jehovah’s Witness, you can’t play football. Your life is over. Between the summers of 1998 and 2001 – between leaving school and eventually, after resitting my A levels, going to university – I worked at McDonald’s in Coseley, near Wolverhampton. I was living with my maternal grandparents, who subscribed to Sky Sports, so I now ...”

“... Italian restaurants in the Village, drank terrible liquor at cigarette-hazed parties. In the summers, they rented a cottage in Long Island, Connecticut or on Cape Cod. The city around them, in the expanding postwar economy (GDP grew by 8.7 per cent in 1950), was awash with money. Amid the new skyscrapers many things were happening: Abstract ...”

“... and elsewhere), I jumped at the chance to study under him. I took his class for five straight summers in Bloomington, Indiana, and then once in Chicago.Lish, now in his eighties, is a shadowy editorial presence in the background of a host of American writers, some commercially successful and some, like Lutz, cult figures, who came of age in the late 1970s ...”

“... of great fiction do not change, much,’ Zadie Smith wrote eight years ago in an essay about David Foster Wallace. ‘But the means do.’ She was between novels: three years had passed since her most traditional, On Beauty, was published; NW, her most experimental, wouldn’t appear for another four. But, as sometimes happens, the changes on the surface ...”

“... Two summers ago​ , 2015, it rained a lot in the West Midlands. A bit glum at first, I lay in the garden when I could, with my pile of madeleines – paper lieux de mémoire, novels. Like many of the old new universities, Warwick was revving up for its 50th-anniversary celebrations. The contribution of my former department to the general gaiety was to be a talk by Margaret Drabble, on the topic of young women at university in the 1960s and 1970s ...”

“... the press that Derek Jeter, the Yankees’ shortstop, a nice, inoffensive boy with cheekbones, the David Beckham of baseball, had promised him that ‘the ghosts would turn up eventually’. The Red Sox were at least spared the indignity of having their misfortunes blamed on some hapless idiot whose glove happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong ...”

“... sea-level rise on Miami Beach real estate, or when Joe Biden’s onetime economic adviser Lawrence Summers proposed that Africa, as a whole, was ‘vastly underpolluted’, and suggested that ‘the economic logic behind dumping a whole load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable.’In its first year, the pandemic did damage according to the ...”

“... a way for a young man to have an exciting career as a journalist, or, like Dickens and his shadow David Copperfield, to become a parliamentary reporter. When the First World War and the economics of differential wages for male and female employees enabled or forced women to take over the shorthand typing, the value of the expertise fell (as well as the ...”

“... apocalyptic Westernists long to turn things around, to make their shattered world whole again. David Goodhart, the founding editor of Prospect, told the New York Times just before the general election that he believed Theresa May could dominate British politics for a generation. Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia and a regular contributor to the New York ...”

“... rides are available. Tarmac would be inconceivable and so the roads remain dirt tracks. In the dry summers they can evoke the Wild West. After a rain-heavy winter, the mud is more reminiscent of Civil War Atlanta in Gone with the Wind.For more than a hundred years, tourism has been nurtured by annual events designed to attract visitors while amusing the ...”

“... in the 15 years she’s been writing novels. Her first, The Cast Iron Shore (1996), won the David Higham Prize for Fiction; her second, When I Lived in Modern Times (2000), won the Orange Prize over the shoo-in, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth; her third, Still Here (2002), was longlisted for the Booker Prize; her fourth, The Clothes on Their Backs ...”

“... attacks, she responded that the term was ‘painfully accurate’, and mounted a defence of David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, as if the prescriptive Englishman posed the already canonised Americans a grave threat. ‘We cannot be all the writers all the time,’ she wrote. ‘We can only be who we are … Writers do not write what they want, they ...”