“... the titles sound important, the back pages are crammed with appendices, footnotes, bibliographies. Malcolm Bradbury includes a ‘Select Bibliography’ and a ‘List of Major Works’. Frederick Karl offers up columns of elaborate notes. Marshall Walker supplies a ‘chronological table’ that correlates authors and titles with events (Alexander Graham Bell ...”

“... needed to know about ‘emergence’, ‘power laws’ and ‘virality’ in the network age, with Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (2000) at the top of the pile. The sudden enthusiasm for these ideas was partly a side effect of the internet’s arrival in everyday life, but also a reflection of their individualist foundations. Society, to a network ...”

“... know-how – and a lot of computer-generated money. Representing the constituency of the users, Malcolm Bradbury, gracefully grateful on behalf of the writing profession for so writer-friendly a dictionary, offered some innocent jests about bazooms – the last word actually defined in Volume One (A-Bazouki), though, as various persons complained from the ...”

“... experienced climate change but that they may, in part, have caused it. The palaeoclimatologist William Ruddiman has suggested that people started assaulting the ozone layer with greenhouse gases about eight thousand years ago, when farming began to replace hunting and gathering. Deforestation carried out by a growing population may have made the world ...”

“... The British reappear in the strange voyage of the Batchelors’ Delight, 1683-5, captained by William Ambrosia Cowley and controlled by the more piratical William Dampier. A storm blew them to the Falklands – they had been ‘discoursing of the intrigues of women’, which brings bad weather – and they saw ‘foul ...”

“... and making a face, she’d offer a defining word after each name:Gloria Steinem – phoneyJanet Malcolm – pretentiousRenata Adler – crackpotSusan Sontag – nobodyNora Ephron – liarOther hand:Kenneth Tynan – creepTruman Capote – leechGeorge Plimpton – slickTom Wolfe – talentlessPhilip Roth – jerkIt was a mercy she only had two hands. To be ...”

“... in little magazines throughout the 1960s, there was a 15-year silence between The Nightfishing and Malcolm Mooney’s Land, during which, it is said, his publisher, Faber, assumed (possibly hoped) the poet had died. Even within the brotherhood of the St Ives group, Graham’s poetry was little read or appreciated. The links between Graham and the painters ...”

“... In July​ 1657 William Wood, a young immigrant to Maryland, was paddling along a creek of the Patuxent River when he found a body floating in the water. Dragging the corpse to land, he discovered it was Harry Gouge, a servant of John Dandy’s, whose watermill Wood had just left. He fetched Dandy, who came with two other men ...”

“... such varied activities as the riots at Toxteth and the manufacture of nuclear weapons. When Malcolm Muggeridge and I were young we used to speculate about the end of civilisation. Little did we expect it would come in our lifetimes. I regard myself as a loyal member of the Labour Party. By this I mean that I usually disagree with what it does. Take the ...”

“... help it. I came to them late, sort of.’ This exchange is between Rhiannon and Gwen, wife of Malcolm, who was once in love with Rhiannon though Peter was much more so, so much so that she had to have an abortion in consequence. The two are talking in Gwen’s kitchen, where ‘with a small start Rhiannon noticed that the bottle of white wine on the table ...”

“... in NY daily’). Four years later he and the Aikens went to Mexico and stayed for a while with Malcolm Lowry and his wife in Cuernavaca, fifty miles from Mexico City. Rain, altitude, the warring couples, sleeplessness and black widow spiders were bad enough but when Josefina the maid cooked them a rabbit whole, fur and all, in tepid water, he bolted to ...”

“... Corvo), C.P. Snow and Virginia Woolf. There are also allusions to other texts, such as William Golding’s Free Fall, and to literary schools and sub-genres: the Chester-Belloc style of essay writing is caricatured in Egbert Merrymarsh, and there is a postgraduate sherry-party scene that was supposed to be a kind of distillation of the post-Amis ...”

“... by the Lord Protector, who favours her elder half-sister, Lady Mary, the future (Catholic) queen. William Cecil, a rising royal secretary, is protective towards Elizabeth, mindful of the role history may have in store for her. Shardlake is retained as one of her lawyers. Now 47, he is lonely, world-weary, and bored of drawing up conveyances and wills (perhaps ...”

“... with their property. Such practices provided the model for the first attempted general strike, William Benbow’s ‘Grand National Holiday’, so named because ‘a holiday signifies a holy day and ours is to be of holy days the most holy . . . established to establish plenty, to abolish want, to render all men equal.’ Unlike the state of ...”

“... no one on the New York arts scene fails to put in an appearance in Tippins’s book, starting with William Dean Howells and Stephen Crane, up through Thomas Wolfe, and on to anyone you care to name, sliding to an elegant halt with Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland. Largely it’s the names, not the work. You almost get the impression that Arthur Miller ...”