“... lacking in ‘industry and perseverance’ in business matters, to borrow from his description of Frank Clare, the worthless young love interest in No Name, and began to write and publish fiction. At 22, as his father was dying, he was sent to read law at Lincoln’s Inn; he spent his time there working on his second novel manuscript. On his father’s death ...”

“... Blair/Bush correspondence – it was claimed that disclosure could make future leaders chary of frank discussion – means the inquiry has been limited to ‘gists’, though Chilcot says these will be ‘sufficient to explain our conclusions’. There were further delays because of the need to declassify thousands of documents; this wasn’t completed ...”

“... was earlier posed, as she acknowledged, by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov and by William James in ‘The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life’. Ishiguro’s novels pose versions of it too, if not with such immediate horror.In Never Let Me Go, for instance, the child isn’t alone, and Kathy and her companions aren’t miserable. Their lives are ...”

“... a little magazine named after one of Roussel’s works, Locus Solus: Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler were collaborators. It ran for four issues and included the founders’ work alongside that of Barbara Guest, Frank O’Hara, Edwin Denby and others. Locus Solus was like the intersection of New York, Paris and a ...”

“... Miller has overslept’. Whether the reference to Gay Talese’s famous Esquire piece, ‘Frank Sinatra has a cold’, was intentional hardly matters. The line has been used in so many cover stories it has become its own trope.Despite the big claims and obvious changes, it’s difficult to imagine the print magazine carrying on for much longer in its ...”

“... for the office, clearly knowing when he was licked. You couldn’t hope to out-dress old Frankie-Frank Spellman, one of the great bitch drag queens of this or any other age. Nobody should grudge the frumpish Hoover a fling or two, or indeed a flounce, though probably with his figure and complexion the stockings were a mistake. (Didn’t he have one kind ...”

“... at this stage, and which terminate in this motto, a motto employed, for a different purpose, in Frank Kermode’s Romantic Image – it may be that they are all true. But it may also be that he is at home with contradiction, growing up as he did in the shadow of that riven rock, the Catholic Protestant policeman. Some of his contradictions might be deemed ...”

“... was in essence a heavy-breathing version of the noir fix on Los Angeles which began in 1934 with James M. Cain’s The postman always rings twice, surging through Chandler, Faulkner, film noir, the extraordinary novels of Chester Himes and on towards Rechy, Didion and Bret Easton Ellis. Davis acutely points out that noir – dystopian revulsion at the ...”

“... calls them) taken from the fiction of Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, George Eliot, Hardy and James. As usual her commentary is essayistically loose. But one is struck by how good a reader she is. She is at her best when most closely interacting with the text, intelligently ‘feeling’ the novel, as it were. In the Dickens chapter, she illuminates the ...”

“... was special. Mies van der Rohe was asked to design it after a committee had considered both Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier: Phyllis Lambert, an architect and the daughter of the head of Seagram, persuaded her father that the opportunity to give New York a great building should not be lost. The Four Seasons restaurant on the ground floor – a ...”

“... is nonetheless something remarkable about such an outbreak of locutory primness in a normally frank and free-spoken people. Euphemisms crop up in other connections: for instance, in the extraordinary modesty of boo-docks for buttocks, or buns, bunky, bungkajeenis (perhaps a spoof word) for your mere quotidian bum – which is admittedly not a word for ...”

“... who might with reason feel a sense of grievance at Davis’s historiographical bugaboo is Frank McGregor, whose unpublished thesis on the Rangers (Oxford, 1968) has been pillaged by David wholesale, yet who gave to him the most interesting part of his case. For McGregor, in several articles, has himself developed the argument that George Fox and ...”

“... of modern cryptography during World War One; Stewart Menzies, head of SIS (the model for James Bond’s M); Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Strong from Military Intelligence, who had, in 1940, warned the disbelieving French that Hitler would attack through the Ardennes, and who was later appropriated by Eisenhower to become his chief of Intelligence; and ...”

“... the later pages of the book are sprinkled with famous names – John Barrymore, Burl Ives and Frank Sinatra all have walk-on parts – the only literary figure who appears is John Buchan, and that as Governor General of Canada. Fox has said she ‘knew certain people, like Alfred Kazin and the Trillings and Philip Roth, but we didn’t have literary ...”

“... Bill Gates earned more than the lowest-paid 40 per cent of Americans combined. ‘Once,’ Thomas Frank writes in his terrific book One Market under God :2 Americans imagined that economic democracy meant a reasonable standard of living for all – that freedom was only meaningful once poverty and powerlessness had been overcome. Today, however, American ...”