“... hard not to credit Zenobia with the coup, as she then emerged as the unchallenged regent for her young son, Vaballathus. She decorated her court with agile intellectuals who knew where they were most likely to find cash rewards: Cassius Longinus, whose On the Sublime is the most important work of ancient literary criticism between Aristotle and ...”

“... to pop up every few pages in this biography; it must have felt like a second home to him. As a young man he was gone for years at a time, to Europe in the late 1910s, to the US a decade later. He starved and bludged his way around Icelandic diasporas on two continents: the Icelandic wife of a millionaire in Brighton, the community of so-called ‘Western ...”

“... this occasion. Monday 17 October was a different story: the Police were confronted by quite a few young men: we were not running away any more. Confrontation took place on the tip – miners versus police. For a brief time we had shown that the people of Grimethorpe had had enough. The police station was stoned, and windows broken. By three in the afternoon ...”

“... of personal history and the pretty stuff on the public record. Let’s take the spirit of J. Michael Lennon’s ‘double life’ of Norman Mailer and offer that doubleness back as subjective criticism. Mailer, after all, gave us the non-fiction novel, Lennon gives us the pseudo-objective biography, so why can’t I offer the confessional review? On the ...”

“... to arrest and prosecution. Bartlett describes the case of a pseudonymous British man called Michael, whom he interviewed for the book. In his fifties, happily married with a grown-up daughter, Michael protests, quite genuinely it seems, that he is ‘a very ordinary, heterosexual bloke. I was never ...”

“... If you took​ only the subject matter of Michael Ondaatje’s novels into account, you would expect him to be an austere and even punishing writer. He chooses the darkest material, chronicles passages of life that would test the most resilient cheerfulness. Coming through Slaughter (1976) is loosely based on the tragic life of the jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden, who died in an asylum in New Orleans ...”

“... Marine’ because you’d fallen for this young priest he was a loiner Tim Ryan that’s a lie and driven with him July a heatwave all through the West the East Riding some harbour Hornsea Spurn Head it’s pathetic you were in cheesecloth he’d green shades I could scream still the Society of Jesus ...”

“... after the dope, the hair, the music and the flowery rhetoric flowed free, those of us who were young enough to inhabit the land of spiked milk and honeyed hash fudge are in our forties and fifties. Which is only to be expected, although, of course, it was the last thing that anyone did, in fact, expect. There’s nothing more difficult to get a solid grip ...”

“... to All Quiet on the Western Front. But he died in 1970, leaving it unfinished: a massive stub. Michael Hofmann, his translator, recalls some other unfinished fictions. But this is not The Mystery of Edwin Drood or The Man without Qualities. Those two books lack their ends, but what remains doesn’t feel raw or rough; they simply break off. The Promised ...”

“... Michael Moorcock’s novel honours the loonies of London. It seems there are more of them every year, especially since – by one of the more perverse acts of enlightenment – the asylums were emptied in the Seventies. One sees the London mad everywhere in the streets and parks: ranters, mutterers, arm-wavers. The quieter cases are charitably allowed into the public bars of seedy pubs; I once saw one huddled over his light ale with an antique mahogany-cased ECT apparatus perched beside him ...”

“... the auditorium was full. The audience was overwhelmingly friendly – hundreds of thrusting young Fabians and other ambitious New Labour apparatchiks, not to mention Michael Portillo – with just one heroic heckler. She tolerated the cant for well over an hour, her reticence finally breaking when Campbell said that ...”

“... She went to high-society schools, where she read Kipling to her boyfriends. She married a young Air Force officer, and became, in her twenties, an important personality in Washington society. Her main male friend outside her collapsing marriage was the Ambassador in Washington of the new Fascist regime in Italy, Prince Gelasio Caetani, an attractive ...”

“... began, she claims, lifting a thin, short prosthetic hand and forearm from the rack. It is for a young boy who was injured before Christmas. She alleges that the Israelis ordered him to take down a Palestinian flag from a high-voltage wire near Nablus. They made him stand on a jeep and had him try to remove the flag with a metal pole. The force of the ...”

“... of Jonsonian types in the working-out of conundrums in the morality of everyday life. Her hero, Michael Hoath, is the newly appointed vicar of St Hilary’s, a West Country parish. His wife Valentine is beautiful. They are childless. She is no more than decently dutiful in the discharge of her function as the Vicar’s wife, and is aware of the attentions ...”

“... cabin, and the electric heater – so that it ‘would be warm on our return’. John Thayer, a young neighbour of the Eustis’s in Pennsylvania, shared a suite of rooms with his parents. After the impact, which he noticed hardly at all (‘if I had had a brimful glass of water in my hand not a drop would have been spilled’), he told them that he ‘was ...”