“... and Scottish father in Eastbourne in May 1940 and raised in Balham in South London. She married Paul Carter in 1960 when she was just twenty, then moved with her husband to Bristol, where she wrote four novels in quick succession and started publishing her journalism in New Society magazine. Her third novel won a travel award of £500, which Carter used to ...”

“... he died in 1991 he could have run through all the major platform games – Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros – and if he’d just taken a little better care of himself, and hung onto life a couple more years, his fingers might have twitched the course of Doomguy through the military base on Phobos, and manipulated him into killing the demons from ...”

“... belief and devastating disillusion, because he had grown up in a family with a resident guru, one Paul Brunton or P.B. Masson’s tantalising remarks about this unusual upbringing have been fleshed out in My Father’s Guru, and it’s a dilly. There have been memoirs before about growing up in a narrow sect – one thinks of Edmund Gosse and the Plymouth ...”

“... so unyielding to Morris’s probings. In principle at least, his desire to find out what sort of man Reagan was seems entirely reasonable. Of all American Presidents, the foolish-seeming and yet abominably successful Reagan surely presents the most tempting subject for character analysis. If Morris had come back armed with any insight into what lurked ...”

“... in Seven Days’ and so on. After getting out of jail, Moat got a gun and a haircut ‘like Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver’, and he repeatedly called Sam, who had broken up with him when he was inside; she rejected him. On the night of Friday, 2 July, he was driven to Birtley, where Sam lived, by his friend Karl Ness. He tracked Sam and her boyfriend down to ...”

“... to these essays, and in the course of this review I described his remarks on the subject of de re necessity as ‘wholly worthless’, a phrase I had hesitated over but felt was literally correct. As I feared, he raised the topic of this review. I steeled myself for his rebuke for dismissing his views so summarily, but he made no mention of the phrase ...”

“... plucking his sleeping master’s sleeve to draw his attention to the time; he was an elderly man of deferential mien who had been painted by Sicken in 1909.’ A description of the disparate lives in Mrs Wilson Clark’s house, done in this manner, would have been enough. It is a splendidly odd but entirely plausible household: a Jewish refugee professor ...”

“... the young French artist Adrienne-Marie-Louise Grandpierre-Deverzy exhibited The Studio of Abel de Pujol, a painting of her teacher’s workshop. More than a dozen female trainees are shown going about their business. A little group looks over de Pujol’s shoulder as he critiques a sketch; others make copies from ...”

“... respect of professional critics, who are favoured: V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, David Storey, Paul Scott, Iris Murdoch, for instance. Beyond that it isn’t easy to see much significance in the list – perhaps there’s a nostalgia for the old Empire (Scott, J.G. Farrell, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, plus Nadine Gordimer, Naipaul, and P.H. Newby on ...”

“... Tucked among these items is a paragraph of local news: ‘The Coroner was told that De Vere had been drinking heavily on that day. Death was due to inhalation of vomit.’ The story that Stow neatly tells is about the events leading up to that coroner’s verdict: but his way of displaying it suggests that he is attempting, as well as a skilful ...”

“... the passing of Beans, Grandpa (‘My maternal grandfather is four ways lost. He is dead. He was a man of Monmouthshire. He was a steel man. He was an industrial craftsman. You don’t get much more lost than that’); Democracy (‘Democracy is the ultimately unarguable good . . . Do you have that straight in your ...”

“... to approach more rapidly than the unified world market itself. Oryx and Crake was a brilliant tour de force, in which two dystopias and a utopia were ingeniously intertwined. What may now surprise us is that Atwood has decided to go on living in that universe, which, however, did not have a to-be-continued sign attached to it. The wonderful cliffhanger of the ...”

“... his earlier rhyming verse before issuing his Collected Poems (1928), claiming that ‘the young man interfered with his demon’ while the older man was less inhibited. Or that this edition faithfully tracks all the adjustments made by timid publishers’ readers, and the versions sent to different agents as Lawrence ...”

“... architect modelling the relationship of ‘Hans Pfitzner or Richard Strauss, or Furtwängler, or Paul Hindemith to a patron resembling Goebbels’. He suggests that Prince’s early poetic experiments were ‘influenced by the styles of political, economic and literary criticism as these were presented – or, as some would say, paraded – in the pages of ...”

“... faces, clothes and attitudes of the main players – like those dreary Art Deco canvases of Tamara de Lempicka now reproduced everywhere on postcards and Taschen calendars – have become all too familiar. Romaine Brooks’s hideous painting of Una Troubridge (with pet dachshunds) in male drag and monocle? Take it away, Madame, tout ...”