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“... the printer’s name. No such rigorous obligation attaches to statements of authorship. It is a licence that fiction, in particular, has richly exploited. Ever since its rise the novel has flirted with authorial anonymity and pseudonymity. Great unknowns, pen names and spoof attributions figure centrally in the genre’s history, from Scott, to George ...”

“... soldier in the Parliamentary Army. Bunyan was also imprisoned for 12 years for preaching without a licence, and in 1966 Paisley was imprisoned for three months for demonstrating outside the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church. In a statement he said, ‘It will take more than Captain O’Neill’s nasal twang to defy us’ – the class grudge is ...”

“... appetites, exceptionally promiscuous, prone to taking lovers of both sexes. Yet all is not licence. Exceptional self-control was displayed by a medical scientist who, after an unhappy experience in America, stopped having love affairs in 1947. A noble philosopher made it plain to his wife that their mutually agreed freedom to have affairs with other ...”

“... from the Midwest and the South in RVs, SUVs and mini-vans. In our motel parking lot we count licence plates from 15 states, and at the shows there are busloads of customers back for their tenth or 12th trip. They are an odd mix: military groups, large neatly dressed families, senior citizens, toothpick-chewing bikers. The Red Hat Society is having a ...”

“... attend cabinet, though he was briefed on its proceedings, unlike his predecessor under Callaghan, Tom McCaffrey, who was denied access even to the cabinet minutes. My point is that the more laconic prime ministers seem to have suffered no real damage by refusing to court the press and paying only spasmodic attention to the newspapers. Of course, there are ...”

“... have fist-bumped. To get this close, we journos had to bring specific photo ID (‘driver’s licence or passport’), be searched, undertake to make notes only with pen and notepad, refrain from filming, recording or photographing, and ‘for security reasons to keep details of this event confidential until after it has taken place’. In other ...”

“... patients and nursed first his mother during the consumption that killed her and then his brother Tom. Though not well understood or treatable, the symptoms of what we know as tuberculosis were familiar enough. Keats recognised at once the colour and meaning of the arterial blood he vomited up and knew he would not survive.When he left England with Severn he ...”

“... possibility of miracle. ‘There is a straight ladder from the atom to the grain of sand,’ says Tom Stoppard’s physicist in Hapgood, ‘and the only real mystery in physics is the missing rung. Below it, particle physics; above it, classical physics; but in between, metaphysics.’ Contemporary thought charts the known in order to fathom the mystery of ...”

“... he’s already pulling clear, setting himself up to shoot some lights. However, I do catch his licence plate. I’m not about to report it; at least, not in the accepted sense. But I do jot it down for future reference: it’s NWA 199. The name of one of South Central’s most notorious black rap groups – they had an album called ‘Straight Outta ...”

“... a striped Tesco carrier bag. He calls it ‘bollocks boring’ and demands something ‘like what Tom Clancy writes’, something ‘what people will read’. He is scornful of the barrage of academic quotations, footnotes and background research. What is reproduced here of his criticism sounds right to me and in the one or two places where Masters leaves in ...”

“... including a biologist, a geologist, an anthropologist, an astronomer, and preferably Professor Tom Shippey of Leeds University to advise on the philology. A novel written under such conditions needs as much planning as a mountaineering expedition; and Brian Aldiss has performed the Science Fictional equivalent of scaling the Matterhorn. The production of ...”

“... making short hops on rural roads or motor industry employees, often in overalls and clutching licence plates, on their way to collect vehicles in order to drive them back to garages or dealerships, as I did back in the day. By the early 1990s hitchhiking was well on its way to becoming, as Purkis puts it, ‘something people only do in horror ...”

“... government car goes by they salute – they’re all the same model of Mercedes and have the same licence plate commemorating ‘Victory Day’ in the Korean War: 27 July 1953. As a foreigner, I got the odd salute too. If you speak to anyone in the tiny community of expats in Pyongyang – mostly diplomats and NGO people – you’ll hear talk of the regime ...”

“... and ferris wheels; ‘Dystopia 2: London as Surveillance City’ is a reminder to get a TV licence, and shows an abstract cityscape of towers and terraces seen from above as if in a video game, with the legend ‘London is in our database. Evaders will pay.’ Something has gone horribly wrong, and the solace the authors find in the architecture of ...”

“... feels it does in the case of Meredith and Thackeray. (There is even something self-limiting about Tom Jones as a novel – for the same kind of reason?) As Furbank points out, the novels of Thackeray, Meredith and Trollope frequently take their very form from a social absolute – who is and who isn’t – which must be fundamentally unreal. ‘Evan ...”