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“... Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine is a book about the mind electrically at odds with vacancy and repose; about the astonishing turbulence in the little grey cells of little grey people like you, and me, and Howie, who at lunchtime quits his office on the mezzanine floor and goes down the escalator to the street, to buy milk and cookies and a new pair of shoelaces ...”

“... In​ U&I (1991), his book about John Updike, Nicholson Baker imagines explaining the appeal of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library to his literary hero. ‘You know, once you get used to the initially kind of disgusting level of homosexual sex, which quickly becomes really interesting as a kind of ethnography, you realise that this is really one of the best first novels to come along in years and years!’ But Updike couldn’t get used to the sex ...”

“... not only because he worked hard at them, but also because he listened to advice, especially from John Gardner but also, more remotely, from Hemingway, Chekhov and V.S. Pritchett. One of the things he learned was the need for arduous revision, draft after draft. Another lesson was that the writer needs to trust the tale. Lawrence notoriously advised the ...”

“... going to get it done hard and fast and get out. Winning – as a famous old football coach called John Madden likes to say on his radio segment in San Francisco – is a great deodorant. But now they’re calling in the script doctors, fast. But wait. Here comes Osama’s right-hand no-good, Ayman al-Zawahiri, appearing on al-Jazeera with a picture of the ...”

“... It seems that the likes of Edward Larocque Tinker, Robert P. Swierenga and Colonel John S. ‘Rip’ Ford have all made valuable contributions to our knowledge of the cowboy world, and Richard Slatta’s Cowboys of the Americas* sets out to illuminate the structures and processes behind the historical underpinning behind those who wear spurs ...”

“... sceptical of these denials, as she is of those of Mansfield’s ‘wife’, the ever-devoted Ida Baker whom Mansfield referred to variously as ‘Jones’, ‘the Mountain’ and ‘the slave’, whom she said often she hated and once said she thought of shooting with her revolver, and whom she would not allow to touch her. This modern ‘we know ...”

“... is not dumb – narrow yes, facile certainly, but not dumb. Nor are his managers: to watch James Baker, Secretary of State under George I, work the courts and manipulate the media in Florida is to witness a pro at work. And Dick Cheney is the very definition of a veteran operative. Nevertheless, high on his resumé is the fact that Bush gave up drinking at ...”

“... Barnes’s hero on the Metropolitan line’s grand design: Fifty miles from Verney Junction to Baker Street; what a line. Can you imagine – they were planning to join up with Northampton and Birmingham. Have a great link through from Yorkshire and Lancashire, through Quainton Road, through London, joining up with the old South Eastern, then through a ...”

“... thanks to Hassan, there were still 164,000 files to be processed. The following year, James Baker, Bush Senior’s former secretary of state, was appointed as special envoy to Kofi Annan and matters began to proceed with more vigour, even though the referendum was now six years behind schedule. Hassan had got his way with some, at least, of the initial ...”

“... English housing and town planning. In other English buildings the influence is direct. Colin St John Wilson was a friend and admirer. Sources for the steep roofs, the vertical accent (the clock tower), the plain brick walls, wave-profiles in entrance hall ceilings and the careful modulation of light in the reading rooms of his British Library can be found ...”

“... with an ANC-ruled South Africa, back within the Commonwealth. If the book has a hero it is Sir John Maud, the British high commissioner who advised in 1960 that since a black government must come to power one day, Britain must ‘keep faith’ with the black majority, while at the same time not antagonising the National Party government to no good ...”

“... being negotiated with France, reignited the wrath of the North Briton’s flamboyant co-editor John Wilkes and his backers in the City, prompting the publication of another withering issue, number 45. The new prime minister, George Grenville, and his secretary of state, Lord Halifax, decided it was time to put a stop to this constant assault on government ...”

“... John Searle’s subtitle alludes to the mode of reflection about language which he recommended, and showed in operation, in his earlier book Speech Acts. What the theory of speech acts offers is a view of language which is to allow us to take full account of the fact that linguistic behaviour is behaviour, without lapsing into a behaviouristic obliteration of the inner life ...”

“... shows a mill being brought back into use under the eye of God the Father. Christ is emptying St John’s eagle out of a sack into a hopper to join St Matthew’s angel, St Mark’s lion, St Luke’s ox and St Paul with his sword. They are ground into the pure flour of hope, faith and love, scooped up and bagged by Erasmus the miller under the supervision of ...”

“... 1928 Charlotte Mew killed herself by drinking a bottle of disinfectant in a nursing-home near Baker Street. She left behind her a volume of poems, a number of uncollected essays and short stories, and instructions that after her death her main artery should be severed: she had thought a lot about being buried alive. Local newspapers reported the ...”