“... which vanquishes Condon and DeLillo while leaving spare capacity for the imagination. And here is Harry Hubbard, his outwardly insipid narrator. Hubbard is a white-collar type of CIA man, a ‘ghost’ writer of planted texts, who is vicariously thrilled by the knowledge that he is working with ruthless men. He meets his ‘other half’ of the Agency, Dix ...”

“... be aware is that of the Australian Peter Carey’s very comparable Bliss (1981), whose ad-man hero Harry Joy revives at the start after being clinically dead for nine minutes, and returns, winded, to his former way of life, deprived of his former breezy ‘optimism’, even suspecting that he is still dead and now in Hell. It is not just in the cracking-up and ...”

“... Ian himself does not want to be noticed – or at least not by the kind of woman Anne Tyler is, a smart writer of books. The Accidental Tourist is built round an analogous idea – a travel writer who hates travelling, and whose guides supply a kind of damage control system for those forced into it against their wishes. Ian, we may say, is the accidental hero ...”

“... nor his enterprise. He has come a long way. As a juvenile his ‘ambition was to be frightfully smart and West End, wear beautifully-cut suits lounging on sofas in French-window comedies’. Fifty years later ‘I was asked to put suppositories up my bottom under the bedclothes and play a scene in the lavatory which I confess I found somewhat ...”

“... give me credit for more than I can do.’ Her great mistake was her involvement with Harry Price, a ghost hunter, professional journalist and professional sceptic. Price liked to present himself as in pursuit of knowledge but was really, like so many in the spirit game, in pursuit of profit. In 1923 he had split off from the Society for Psychical ...”

“... Capitalism makes clear, in the Victorian City of London if you weren’t credulous you were very smart indeed. Klaus swims against the current of neoliberal vindication of Adam Smith. He sees the ‘invisible hand’ as a figment of Enlightenment optimism; the free individual motivated by true self-interest as a theoretical model, not an empirical ...”

“... at the time of Roe v. Wade abortion was not a partisan issue. The opinion in Roe was written by Harry Blackmun, a Nixon appointee, and supported by four other justices appointed by Republican presidents. In dissent were Rehnquist, another Nixon appointee, and Byron White, a socially conservative Democrat, who had been nominated to the court by John ...”

“... of mad extravagance, entertaining lavishly, gambling, spending a fortune on clothes, servants and smart cars, and becoming a heavy drinker. His friends began to be embarrassed by him, as an eccentric; and on one occasion, in Australia in 1922, he got too drunk to appear on the stage. Worse followed. In October 1924, driving through Hyde Park, he ran into a ...”

“... special talents are of most value.’ Wallace quotes Greer as claiming that the nuns ‘were not smart enough’; that she would still be a Catholic ‘if I’d been taught by Jesuits’. If accurate, this exemplifies what rival feminists often accuse her of: a tendency to put down less able women and simultaneously to romanticise and flatter males. This is ...”

“... street back to luxury in a matter of days. The appropriation of populism by luxury designers is a smart survival strategy, creating a new kind of scarcity and better publicity for perfumes and accessories than money could buy. In the same way, when movie stars go and collect their Oscars in their loaned designer frocks, millions buy the scent and the ...”

“... quotations is also the bastard offspring of the early modern jest book, which ascribed jokes and smart sayings to well-known figures such as the poet John Skelton or the fool Richard Tarleton. Jest-book-style anecdotes were often transcribed alongside more serious quotations in manuscript notebooks compiled by individual readers. So in 1601, the lawyer John ...”

“... president won the Pulitzer Prize? And are the science fiction stories H.P. Lovecraft ghosted for Harry Houdini not the best things he ever wrote? There would be a touch of all this in the strange case of Assange. But there is something else about the genre, a sense that the world might be more ghosted now than at any time in history. Isn’t Wikipedia ...”

“... introduced to Anglophone readers, in translations by the Viennese refugee and Brandeis professor Harry Zohn:* Many share my views with me. But I don’t share them with them. To have talent, to be a talent: the two are always confused. Why should one artist grasp another? Does Mount Vesuvius appreciate Mount Etna? At most, a feminine relationship of ...”

“... all his naiveté – about himself. Karim’s father Haroon (his English in-laws firmly call him Harry) is going through a mid-life crisis that echoes Karim’s adolescent yearnings for change. As a young immigrant from Bombay, Dad fell in love with a pretty English girl, took a boring Civil Service job, and found himself trapped in a life that was ‘all ...”

“... homosexuality, that finally rip it apart. Ben is the model child of a model family, handsome, smart, athletic, kind, above all, loved, and his greatest desire is not to lose that love or to hurt those who love him, which he sees as the inevitable result of the revelation of his homosexuality. These ideas exist just below the surface of Ben’s ...”