“... had shaken off the dust of Oak Park, Illinois, he was at least in a position to say hullo to John Updike in the office corridor. He had put enough mileage between himself and his origins to achieve urbanity. Yet it takes only a brief comparison between Keillor’s Lake Wobegon stories and Updike’s Rabbit novels (or, even more to the point, Updike’s ...”

“... tide has suddenly turned. The tirade against Brussels from Mrs Thatcher’s former adviser, Sir John Hoskyns, was not well received by the Institute of Directors he was still serving. Opinion polls show and the results of the Euro-elections confirm that outright hostility to the Community is no longer an obvious winner. Mrs Thatcher is suffering both from ...”

“... Park in Hampshire – as well as jokier numbers – Terry Farrell’s boathouse at Henley and John Outram’s Isle of Dogs pumping-house. It stretches to high technology in Michael Hopkins’s stand at Lord’s cricket ground and to eclectic neo-vernacular in Jeremy Dixon’s crow-stepped-gabled housing in Docklands. Among the targets for the Prince’s ...”

“... a dust-sheet over her first husband. Miss Edwards excellently takes it off. The second husband, John Marsh, was an advertising copywriter and a PR man. He read her epic carefully and, among many other things, took out the dashes. Gone with the Wind was written in a peculiar manner. It is, of course, very long, but epics are supposed to be. (Beckett’s ...”

“... is it starting to build up again, and in drastically altered form. Thus, when a French reader sets foot in a British bookshop, the impact is powerfully bizarre – as he stumbles into a wall of memoirs and recollections. It’s as if the minutest ghost, returned to haunt the literary scene, can enchant the greedy English customer. Let us consider now the ...”

“... recently it was possible to visit South-fork ranch and for $4 a square inch – or $25 a square foot – purchase a title deed complete with oil rights. Other spin-offs include the scent Forever Krystle at £53 an ounce, and a collection of Alexis’s clothes. When the Dynasty range was opened at Blooming-dale’s, 26,000 women stormed the New York ...”

“... off to school, their fees paid by a rich grandfather. When out riding they raise their hats to foot passengers: ‘Mum said this was important, otherwise people would think we were stuck-up.’ On rare visits to London they consult the best dentist, patronise the shop acknowledged by all to be the best for school uniforms, visit a Mayfair barber, lunch at ...”

“... Continental Drift, Bob Dubois dies of stab wounds on a Miami side street. That novel won the 1985 John Dos Passos Prize and was nominated for the Pulitzer. The road not taken isn’t pretty, but there’s a lot of mileage in it. ‘This is not Bambi territory,’ a lawyer says in The Sweet Hereafter, the story of a small town convulsed when a school bus ...”

“... produced similar collections of the writings of Thomas Paine and his contemporaries in the 1790s, John Thelwall, Robert Owen and the British Utopians, and the responsibility for producing a Chartist canon could not have fallen into better hands. Few scholars can match Claeys’s ability to render 19th-century radicalism and socialism coherent by locating ...”

“... house blocked the release for more than five months. Internal emails paint a picture of continual foot-dragging. One senior Cabinet Office official suggested releasing information in a ‘managed way’, comparing the situation to the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War. So far, the government has insisted that all is as it should be. In early December, Michael ...”

“... hat, velveteen suits and collection of hundreds of umbrellas, he resembles no one so much as John Steed in The Avengers – a show much loved in France, and still running weekly on TV there under the title Chapeau melon et bottes de cuir. Satie himself stressed the Englishness of his humour (which he said was ‘reminiscent of Cromwell’s’) and would ...”

“... in the role it allots to women, ‘chits of girls’ and ‘hussies’ must wait on her hand and foot, and only get grumbles for thanks. In a hard-pressed and resentful ending, the poet says (in literal translation) that she’ll do ‘anything just to keep this batty old woman quiet’. Carson makes his own feelings clear by rendering this, more ...”

“... debt at a speed never before achieved, and have built up debts never before seen in peacetime. The foot is on the floor and the needle is in the red. There’s no choice except to slow down – but nobody knows quite how to do it, because it’s never been done before. Put all these things together, and the state we’re in doesn’t look peachy. The imminence ...”

“... novel sequence from the era of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper). Nobody else would link John Betjeman with Anthony Frewin, compiler of The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: An Annotated Film, TV and Videography 1963-92. At this point, Seabrook needs a videography, not a bibliography. He is what he watches, late at ...”

“... London house, 46 Lower Belgrave Street, the countess was violently assaulted and her husband, John Bingham, seventh earl of Lucan, disappeared, offer all things to all tastes. The story has the violent glamour of crime fiction with the additional thrill of reality, and the facts are just enough to make a narrative while leaving hugely tantalising areas of ...”