“... Or for a Thatcherite tract on Britain’s decline from Victorian values. Or for a great novel like Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. The rise and fall of a mercantile dynasty is a rich old subject, and can be approached from several angles. Which will Simon Blow’s be? ‘If I was more Tennant than anything else,’ he ...”

“... coffee houses and taverns. A blue plaque commemorates Dryden, but on the wrong house. At No. 9, a more accurately sited plaque marks where, in 1764, Joshua Reynolds and Samuel Johnson founded the Literary Club, or simply the Club, which met weekly to dine in an upstairs room at the Turk’s Head until the landlord died and the dinners moved elsewhere. The ...”

“... that has characterised my other short-term collecting crazes – the great Scottish civil engineer Thomas Telford. To be more precise, when out driving, I have been going out of my way to visit engineering projects he was involved in designing or building. I came across the most recent addition to my collection in early ...”

“... a hod.’ Post-war, he wanted to be a fire-tongued sage and seer, like his BBC colleague Dylan Thomas. MacNeice worshipped Thomas and did not, we trust, live to read Dylan’s description of his work as ‘thin and conventionally-minded, lacking imagination and not sound in the ear’. MacNeice may not have known for ...”

“... first, The Debt to Pleasure (1996), begins: ‘This is not a conventional cookbook’ – a more interesting way of saying that it is an unconventional novel. And so we are introduced to Tarquin Winot: gastronome, aesthete, snob, psychopath, and one of the most gloriously monstrous, deluded, hilarious, chilling characters to narrate an English-language ...”

“... on a smaller period of time’. Ideas for novels don’t come vaguer than that. He promised ‘more definite plans’ soon. In October 1922, Fitzgerald moved his family (Zelda plus their two-year-old daughter, Scottie) to Great Neck, Long Island and over the next 18 months ‘my novel’ acquired a Midwestern background, a poor boy-rich girl theme, a ...”

“... be fed,’ says a ‘soft, worried’ voice. He assumes it must be a wrong number, and thinks no more about it. But it delays him long enough for him to encounter someone he otherwise wouldn’t have done – and so the chain of unintended, unforeseeable and far-reaching consequences continues. The action travels westward, moving from Japan to Hong Kong, a ...”

“... and artists sometimes trample, burn or mutilate it, but in the post-9/11 years dissenters are more likely to fly the flag than besmirch it. Protesters against the war in Iraq, adopting the slogan ‘peace is patriotic,’ often carry the flag; and two years ago advocates of immigrant rights, many of them non-citizens, waved it in massive demonstrations ...”

“... But then, as luck would have it, since cold cases are all very well but an active murder is far more juicy, ‘the builder who put this place up’, Tony Curran, is found bludgeoned to death in his kitchen, and the club sets to work solving the crime with a little help from a couple of the local plod, PC Donna De Freitas and DCI Chris Hudson.Coopers Chase ...”

“... most likely to have commissioned them is the Howard matriarch Katherine Knyvett, second wife of Thomas Howard, 1st earl of Suffolk. Larkin painted Katherine wearing a red farthingale dress with gold embroidery and a ruff so large her head looks as if it were served up on a plate like John the Baptist’s.A portrait of Katherine’s nephew Richard Sackville ...”

“... be empty, I find every street crammed with cars. Christie’s, too, is crowded, full of art-lovers more specially earnest than the general run so that something about the show repels – the homogeneity of the art-lovers, perhaps, their wholehearted worthiness and consistent middle-agedness. When I leave, the streets are full of disconsolate Roundheads and ...”

“... The double centenary​ in 2012 of the publication of Kafka’s The Judgment and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice was marked only, to my knowledge, by a single conference, in California. Yet these two stories represented crucial breakthroughs for writers who came to dominate the German literature of the age. Both experienced a creative liberation thanks to forces seemingly beyond the conscious efforts that were getting them nowhere – in old-fashioned terms, thanks to inspiration ...”

“... Melamed, who died well before his grandson’s – our author’s – birth, has something of the Thomas Hardy character about him: ‘existlessness’ is his lot. He survives in a picture, a travel document, an address book, a case for a pair of glasses and the glasses themselves, through which Jacobson sees the world as blurred and vertiginous. ‘So this ...”

“... turkeys, hawks and falcons. In 1525, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo sent the emperor ‘thirty or more parrots’, most of which ‘could speak very well’. They didn’t just send birds: in 1528, Hernán Cortés arranged the delivery of a jaguar who ‘is very tame and moves freely about the house and eats at the table what he is given’. Cortés thought ...”

“... There will be many more years –and many more volumes – before the Carlyles’ Collected Letters are brought to completion. Twenty-two more years of Jane Carlyle’s long, witty, sharp, self-dramatising yet oddly attractive litanies about the obstinacy of servants, her husband’s indifference to her, and the annoyances of her lot as a ‘Lion’s wife’ obliged to ‘do the bores’ who come to view the lion himself ...”