“... Jerry says, as Joe drags him out the door. More recently, in Entourage, the HBO series about a young movie star and his gang, we see how the agent-as-harbinger-of-comic-confusion has become, in the modern era, the agent-as-conductor-of-cosmic-chaos. In Series Two, our young actor, a Hispanic on the brink of ...”

“... for Roubiliac’s statue of Newton ‘voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone’; Newton a young man and unwigged so that his head seems quite small and (appropriately) apple-like. We buy a luminous blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the ...”

“... Michael Reynolds is the marrying kind of biographer: president of the Hemingway Society, he has published a 140-page annotated chronology of Hemingway’s life, a 2300-item inventory of Hemingway’s reading, and a monograph-length study of the creation of A Farewell to Arms, as well as three serial volumes of biography: The Young Hemingway (1986); Hemingway: The Paris Years (1989); and Hemingway: The American Homecoming (1992 ...”

“... Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered in 1964. The American Century details J. Edgar Hoover’s personal and the FBI’s institutional linking of white supremacist and anti-Communist hysterias, to which America’s national police devoted far more ...”

“... threatening to turn even Gandhi into an also-ran. Meanwhile, he makes a cameo appearance in Michael Dobbs’s new Good-fellowe thriller, which revolves around the hunt for his next incarnation in London. The Chinese villains are as dastardly as one might wish from HarperCollins, as sinister as the Manchu embassy officials who in 1896 kidnapped the ...”

“... At the centre of Michael Cunningham’s new novel, in the second of its three tales, Cat, a black woman police investigator in New York, has the job of receiving and recording the calls of people threatening to blow themselves and others to pieces. Only because these deranged stories have become too familiar does she miss the one who really means it, a young boy, who, without forewarning or apparent motive, goes up to a stranger in Central Park, embraces him and explodes ...”

“... sort of funny entertainment’. Rock’n’roll as modern vaudeville: I doubt the precious George Michael would agree. On the cover of I was a teenage Sex Pistol Matlock peeps cagily over his shades at you; Bare has George in one of his standard-issue moody pouts. I take it the title connotes the craven exposure of the most secret soul: risky – this risibly ...”

“... reads like the cast-list of some bizarre Antipodean soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious an advocate of anti-German ...”

“... inside flap of the jacket, the publishers were giving away too many clues. The drawing showed the young man whom Mr Pennington describes in his Introduction as having the ‘slight irregularity of face that women find handsome, especially when matched with blond hair and blue eyes’. The photograph of Mr Pennington revealed a dark-bearded, middle-aged man ...”

“... life he had had, what kind of person he was. You lose the pattern, losing a parent when you’re young. I also felt the wish to speak to him or in some way to have a relationship with him. And those poems probably come from an impulse of that sort, from the delayed pain or loss.Were you close to your siblings, not necessarily as a consequence of this, but ...”

“... and many legal theorists believe it is. A literate Martian, for example, would not believe that Michael Zander was writing about the same society as Paddy Hillyard and Janie Percy-Smith, and at the same period of time. There is simply no space in Zander’s world-picture for the possibility that ours is a coercive state or that democracy is in decline here ...”

“... In First Among Equals, Jeffrey Archer introduces a Labour MP who is likewise endangered by a young black girl ‘in a white leather mini skirt so short it might have been better described as a handkerchief’. But, unlike D.M. Thomas, both Raven and Archer are accomplished storytellers, keen on verisimilitude. Both are skilled in the use of stock ...”

“... about avoiding the extemporaneous or the casual and few were mindful of posterity from such a young age. Nabokov turned his early life into memoir, arranged all his editions with bibliographic punctilio, wiped out most traces of an original, raw, unformed self. Having made the stuff of family history into myth, he vanished into it. Boyd checks the myth ...”

“... find yourself laughing and wanting to go back to see why. The opening story describes a party at a young schoolteacher’s house, the children all dressed up to suggest different States of the Union. Here’s how it begins:   Josephine as the Beehive State wants to know if it’s possible to stub your nose. She’s looking far away, maybe even Utah, and ...”

“... acceptance on sufferance by a people who had first made him sign a contract of good behaviour; a young and sickly and insecure heir; large funds earned outside his duchy as mercenary general; a need to compensate for this tough profession and differentiate himself from men like Malatesta down in Rimini; pride in three or four years of genuinely enjoyed ...”