“... Venetia? In one letter, he begged Venetia for a ‘real drive’ – the mind boggles. It would be nice to imagine that Venetia Stanley’s life could be defined by more than just her correspondence with this ‘darling’ man. Buczacki pleads hard that she ‘deserves better’ than to be remembered only for these few years with Asquith. After all, it ...”

“... her partner of almost fifty years.The relationship, Mullard later told Renault’s biographer David Sweetman, was confusing, exciting, intensely romantic and nerve-racking. Neither had much sexual experience, but Mullard thought Renault knew a little more, and from the first they hid their relationship – from the hospital, and later from the sidelong ...”

“... Also, Critchley has written more than twenty books on subjects as various as suicide and David Bowie; this must mean something. But when I began to read, I knew I was in danger, for this was Philosophy.No, I was not the right reader, then, for I am more certain of the parameters of mysticism than philosophy, at least as it is practised by those who ...”

“... a young man were to be heightened by the ‘drive against male vice’ initiated in 1954 under David Maxwell Fyfe as home secretary, whose most notable victim was Lord Montagu, imprisoned for 12 months for homosexual offences. On the Tube, Forster closely observes an ‘enormous young foreigner’. Was he perhaps ‘a Cossack dancer? I would have asked ...”

“... homosexuals: Alexandra in O Pioneers!, Thea in The Song of the Lark, Claude Wheeler and David Gerhardt in One of Ours, Euclide Auclair in Shadows on the Rock, and of course those two priests in Death Comes for the Archbishop. In The Professor’s House we hit pay dirt: according to various commentators, not just Professor St Peter and Tom Outland ...”

“... only TNT,’ Leijten said. ‘The postal system is sick.’ On the eve of my journey to Holland, David Simpson, the earnest Ulsterman who is Royal Mail’s chief spokesman, took me to one of the facilities the company is most proud of, the Gatwick mail centre in Sussex. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the nearby airport. It’s a giant mail ...”

“... a dose. Other houses are clean and tidy, like the one belonging to a 27-year-old whom we’ll call David: children’s clothes hang in a courtyard, there is expensive furniture, a big flat-screen TV. A six-year-old girl, vivacious in her pretty mauve dress, welcomes visitors with a radiant smile. David is a ...”

“... to reply cheerfully to any ugly name you might call it. Hi, I’m the Nightmare of Consumption. Nice to meet you! The Corrections, as well as being a far better novel than Jameson’s stricture on an ‘exhausted realism’ would suggest it could be, is a central instance of the literary populism that we can now recognise as one of the main trends of the ...”

“... Dracula with Bela Lugosi. In their 1995 book Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, David Skal and Elias Savada recount the casting process for Freaks: In a Montreal sideshow, scouts discovered Johnny Eckhardt … a startling ‘half-boy’ whose body ended below the ribcage. The armless, legless Prince Randian was a native of British Guiana who ...”

“... as if in that moment – but only in that moment – it could neutralise their sting. It’s nice to think of your father hiding himself away because he was playing with toys, and not because he was a manic depressive, as Arthur proved to be. Nicer to be invited to join a conspiracy than to discover only after his death that your father had treasured ...”

“... Club (‘For Freedom in Everyday Life’): ‘We organise picnics in public places,’ the very nice girl told me, ‘and we smoke and drink at them.’ There was WorldWrite (‘Ferraris for All’): ‘We’re against the notion of pity,’ a boy explained, while trying to flog me a DVD called Flush It!, about how the West foists poor-quality toilets on ...”

“... things happen? Is it because the people who feel strongly about climate change are simply too nice, too educated, to do anything of the sort? (But terrorists are often highly educated.) Or is it that even the people who feel most strongly about climate change on some level can’t quite bring themselves to believe in it? I don’t think I can be the only ...”

“... longueurs. His detective is a marginal presence, cohabiting in Pooterish domesticity with a nice young man. Ackroyd doesn’t burden his narrative with the tedium of a convincing topography, or nostalgia for the lost decencies. He’s busy, with this Post-Modern Sweeney Todd, reviving the shilling shocker – which, thanks to the confusion of the ...”

“... the use of biography, its actual ability to throw light (rather than just to be entertaining and nice to have around), seems to be a fantasy. More particularly, the failure of connection I have mentioned appears to bring in its train a literary fact about Amis himself. Cited by Kenner as one of the philistines, and as liable to give his readers the pleasure ...”

“... significant onomatopoeias. Posh collectors’ editions of Rabelais often have illustrations. Nice as they are, they get in the way. The only work of Rabelais to be ‘illustrated’ from the outset is the so-called ‘partial’ Quart Livre (1548), which he did not see through the press and whose job-lot of woodcuts was lifted from another book. A ...”