“... Once out of Russia, he followed Lenin across Europe and caught up with him in the Reading Room of the British Museum. In spite of the venue, he was not an intellectual but an organiser and fixer: he managed and distributed illicit publications and handled hot Russian money to fund the revolution. Ivy did occasional typing for him, and soon they were ...”

“... enjoyed the secrecy and the exclusivity of the Apostles and, like the eponymous hero of Jacob’s Room, who is partly based on him, he was still more at ease with ‘male society, cloistered rooms, and the works of the classics’.He also joined the Fabians, encouraged by Hugh Dalton, the postwar Labour chancellor. He took it seriously, did a lot of ...”

“... In the eyes of their father, Judith ‘was Queen’. It didn’t help that in his consulting room at 5 rue de Lille there were no photographs of ‘the Lacan children’ – indeed, no photos at all – except for one of Judith as a young girl, ‘presiding over the fireplace’ in a neat sweater and skirt. Sibylle’s prose is compressed and ...”

“... too late because of her social isolation: a bit bookish, a bit determined, a bit odd, up in her room reading Smash Hits; an only child. Buses are important to her story: a woman, a man (doesn’t matter which) walks out of the barren shopping centre, waits in the bitter cold with Farmfood bags cutting into their hands ‘for buses that never come’. The ...”

“... within their minds, and so on. Murnane’s second novel, A Lifetime on Clouds, is centred on Adrian Sherd, a 15-year-old in a repressive Catholic boys’ school, who is given to elaborate sexual fantasies set in America. (First published in 1976, it was cut in half – ‘mutilated’, in Murnane’s word – by its publishers; the restored manuscript is ...”

“... to adopt? What rhetoric did they memorise, what masks did they sport in science’s version of Room at the Top? We get off on the wrong foot, Outram insists, if we accept the fashionable view that the scientific milieu created by the French Revolution was a highly structured and institutionalised one that provided a wealth of scientific posts, opened ...”

“... girl. She is an unusually intelligent child, with a mental age already far in advance of, say, Adrian Mole’s and Holden Caulfield’s (perhaps a hippy upbringing does work), but the actual narrative clearly had to be entrusted to her older self. This would hardly need to be said if the author had not created a disconcertingly strong illusion that the ...”

“... the one juror whose poker face had caused Darrow real concern had settled himself down in the jury room with a book and a cigar and had told the others not to disturb him until they were ready to acquit. Any selection of trials has to leave out scores of equally interesting ones, and it’s pointless to propose one’s own list; but there is one which might ...”

“... the basis of the science described in Dehaene’s book is remarkable. The British neuroscientist Adrian Owen uses brain-scanning technology to study people incapacitated by an accident or stroke. Clinicians had become familiar with locked-in syndrome, whereby a person is paralysed except for one tiny window of voluntary action, such as the capacity to move ...”

“... Allen Ginsbert’s Howl, the substitution of ‘breath’ for metre and gossip for metaphor. Adrian Henri and Roger McGough, with their sedulous imitation of the faux-naif Modernism of e.e.cummings, were just as much part of the movement as Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley or Kenneth Koch. With his Essex Poems, even Donald Davie, the very type of the English ...”

“... restlessness in which someone is always half rising from the most comfortable chair in the room and saying: ‘Do sit here.’ Instead of a lifetime of polite self-effacement, ‘I want to feel I have “lived”,’ she wrote, and immediately squirmed at this ‘Sunday paperish … nonsense’. But she continued: ‘I want to let go, to lose ...”

“... up. Mountbatten was ‘left-wing’ enough to win the attention of people of my sort, the barrack-room lawyers, and he had a ‘right-wing’ appeal for the more regimental sort, Old Comrades, the British Legion, the cricket, golf and football club members. He exerted some authority even in the Royal Family and he had, surely, much more sex appeal than ...”

“... in the final stages of her illness; after her death, in horror of the empty space, he slept in her room among her things. Not long afterwards, he made a drunken effort to shoot himself – the description of this failed suicide in Raymond Chandler Speaking is an ironic tour de force. Travelling between England and the US in his last years, alternately ...”

“... that Welles was his own worst enemy: that he wilfully failed to complete films, feared the cutting-room, damaged his own movies by lack of planning, waywardness, profligacy. This is almost wholly untrue. It amounts to a lifelong calumny on an artist who spent most of his time and most of his money trying to rescue his work from uncomprehending botchers. What ...”

“... ho). He finds his jokes good enough to repeat, like the one about Sue Townsend: ‘creator of Adrian but no mole’. Confronted with such a merry madcap I see that I have no sense of humour at all, and am rather glad about it. On the other hand, in reading this book, I must be missing a lot of jokes. When Gordon speaks of other writers, ‘including he ...”