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“... everyone who visited Sargeson complained about how disgusting it was, but drinking it was the price you had to pay for being in his company. Among what remained of Sargeson’s book collection, which included a copy of Ulysses bought in Paris in the late 1920s during his only visit to Europe, was a shelf of New Zealand writers he encouraged or helped get ...”

“... for a naval historian. His readers, brought up on Horatio Hornblower and Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey, know all about the technicalities and the details of the service already. Stuffed with explanations of loggerheads and bitter ends, capable of laughing at jokes about dog-watches and sailing on a bowline, they will neither turn a hair nor shift a ...”

“... at last gone mad. But when, the next morning, the Sun devotes its entire front page to the Union Jack with a good old British Tommy in its centre, and the rubric up above SUPPORT OUR BOYS AND PUT THIS FLAG IN YOUR WINDOW, thousands of people do so! The Sun has its best morning for years. The Star, the ailing tabloid from the Express group, has a good time ...”

“... and end up stranded, broken and battered, on a small island just off the shore. What follows is a Jack Londonesque tale of survival, with the twist that deliverance lies barely a hundred feet away, on the other side of violent waters. The means of Turtle and Jacob’s eventual self-rescue echoes, cleverly, the perpetual nearness of Turtle’s salvation from ...”

“... business hang-out of the era, Jolson makes his first appearance as the mature Jakie, now known as Jack Robin. The entire scene is redolent of his liberation from tribal taboo. Jack wolfs down an unkosher breakfast with ragtime ebullience, turns a lusty eye on his gentile patroness and then launches into ...”

“... be opened. Some hotels don’t believe in fresh air, or they believe it’s too expensive, if the price of having it is accepting the risk of people smoking (or jumping). On the fourth floor of the Hotel Adlon in Berlin, windows open over a secret courtyard, and I could hear what sounded like an old TV broadcast, the voice of Peter Jennings saying it was a ...”

“... see dozens of bungalows – even a few two-storey houses – lined up like second-hand cars. The price (NZ$30,000) includes delivery and placing on piles, and you can walk through the houses, working out just how you might bring together the two halves of a big one which has been sliced through to help the trailer get it round corners. Because only the piles ...”

“... lively and informed debate about international law-making, democracy and constitutionalism. Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner, the authors of The Limits of International Law, have contributed significantly to that debate and have played an important role in focusing attention on issues of legitimate concern. A similar debate is needed in Britain, as an ...”

“... politicians assume them to be. Electors know that taxes have to be paid and that they are the price for good public services; which is why the Scottish electorate, by a large majority, gave the Scottish Parliament powers to increase the standard rate of taxation. And if increased revenue is seen to be spent on health or education, for instance, it makes ...”

“... Are lies really self-cancelling, or is the candid answer that freedom to lie is part of the price we pay for freedom to speak? Anonymity compounds the conundrum. To expose or refute falsehood can be hard, but it can be far harder when you don’t know who the falsehood is coming from. Internet providers, who know who their users are, claim to be as ...”

“... and for once had not cooked any of it. Then she bought a plastic policeman’s hat and a Union Jack flag on a stick and had a picture taken in front of Big Ben for 50p. When she arrived home at 7 p.m. the police were waiting, called by her panicked eldest daughter. They suspected Emecheta had been at a boyfriend’s house and questioned the absconding ...”

“... Coming back to Oxford, he went to Magdalen College. Again his teachers were splendid, he had Jack Bennett for Anglo-Saxon and Emrys Jones for Shakespeare. I’m sure he spent many hours in the Bodleian, but more on the rugby pitch. In Singing School he doesn’t mention his literary prizes, but he gives the scores of the rugby matches in which he played ...”

“... main attraction. Under its last two directors, it has begun to collect modern British writers. The price paid by the Huntington for Isherwood has not been divulged. A year ago, the sum floating around in (uninformed) coffee-room gossip was a million dollars. Some newspapers in Britain reported ‘several million dollars’, which seems unlikely: it is not that ...”

“... is Born, which has been remade twice as a musical and was itself based on George Cukor’s What Price Hollywood? of 1932. The basic story contrasts the inexorable rise to stardom of an unassuming waitress with the fall into alcoholism of a cynical veteran of the screen – a man who has seen, in the parlance of the time, the tarnish on the tinsel. The ...”

“... million people in Britain buying a new novel every week or two’, and points out that for the price currently charged by British publishers for new hardback fiction, a family could rent a video recorder for a month. This is true: but it’s hard to argue that the novel as a form has any inherent edge over film or television, say, when plot and ...”