“... seen at first sight’ was another of his aphorisms, one that he borrowed from Gotthold Lessing or John Opie, magpie that he was. ‘Every glance is a glance for study,’ he also said. The scene in Rain, Steam and Speed is of an imminent death, the instant of an action caught by a glance. A train rushes across a bridge and is bearing down on a hare that’s ...”

“... wall in King’s Cross Station. Anna’s father reckoned that the Hadmans were related to the poet John Clare, who came from Helpston, a village near their own. Our investigation drew many previously unknown Hadmans from the ground where they had lain, undisturbed, for hundreds of years. They were known to each other, some of them, but unknown to us: lives ...”

“... two daughters to a flat near the British Legation in Bucharest. Everybody was taking precautions. John Treacy, the owner of an oil-well supply business, and his wife, Esther, had moved bedrooms after an incendiary bomb was thrown through their window, and slept with a loaded service revolver on the bedside table. Percy Clark had taken a room at the Athénée ...”

“... surveillance helicopters take off, is closer still to Matthew Allen’s High Beach Asylum where John Clare, distracted by agricultural enclosures, was lodged. But it was the launcher site in Oxleas Wood, where locals had fought hard (and successfully) against motorway incursions, that I wanted to inspect. Leaning on his stick, Steve was waiting at North ...”

“... mummy, no daddy, please Comrade, take pity on an orphan!’ A kindly lighting technician opens a hatch so that she can stand on the catwalk to watch the evacuated Bolshoi Opera perform The Barber of Seville. After her mother left Kuibyshev for university, riding back to Moscow on a train during the winter wearing just a sundress, Petrushevskaya spent the ...”

“... In an episode​ of Seinfeld from 1996, Kramer and Newman hatch an ingenious moneymaking scheme. In New York, where they live, bottles and cans can be recycled for five cents each, but in Michigan the refund is ten cents. They realise that if they collect bottles in New York and take them to Michigan, they can double their money ...”

“... the Mormons: when Moon was jailed for tax evasion his most energetic defenders were Senator Orrin Hatch (Utah) and Congressman George Hansen (Idaho), both Mormons. Jerry Falwell, the Moral Majority leader, joined in the Moonie chorus that Moon’s imprisonment was a violation of religious liberty. Congressmen and Senators were bombarded with offers of free ...”

“... the invention of hieroglyphics by a god, in Plato’s story in the Phaedrus, refuses it, as John Ray recalled in these pages, ‘because it would ruin his subjects’ powers of memory and concentration’. Television stands accused of promoting apathy and inertia, pocket calculators of the decay of mental arithmetic. Often technology is blamed for an ...”

“... cites ‘Bloodchild’ (1984), Octavia Butler’s classic story about gigantic insects who lay and hatch their eggs, as gently as they can, in the humans they rear on reservations for the purpose. It probably doesn’t help that the IPs we get to hear about are usually the celebrities: Elton John and David Furnish; Annie ...”

“... be considered a discovery of the 1990s. The first big show of his work I saw was in 1996; in 1999, John Ashbery published a book-length poem entitled Girls on the Run, the cover of which bore an arresting Darger watercolour showing some of the Vivian Girls in panic-stricken flight. The ‘literariness’ and epic ‘virtual world’ quality of Darger’s work ...”

“... ends. All the British rocketmen talk of the pleasure of working with very high levels of energy. John Scott-Scott was a hydrodynamicist at Armstrong Siddeley Rocket Motors at Ansty near Rugby, who worked on conventional turbine engines before switching to rockets. He invented a turbo-pump incorporating a floating ‘cavitation bubble’ which could turn at ...”

“... of his uncle being a farm-labourer, or the blighted life of the intelligent, radical cobbler John Antell who married into the family. Instead, Hardy exaggerates the scale of the Rockhampton cottage where he was born, his father’s status in the social scale (he attributes his comparative lack of success in the building business to his being by nature ...”

“... Bailey, the well-regarded biographer of Charles Jackson (The Lost Weekend), Richard Yates and John Cheever, three alcohol-plagued novelists whose torments kept late hours. As it happened Atlas would outlive Roth only by a year, dying in September 2019 from complications of a lung condition. At the close of Remembering Roth, he bids sad adieu to Philip ...”

“... and Lesbian Centre. (Margaret Thatcher may be impossible to displace as a totem of oppression, but John Major has been prime minister for a couple of years by the time the book begins.) The only actual gay character in the book, if you exclude the passing dreamboat in his van, is Chickie Jamieson, an elderly, unthreatening and neuter-seeming neighbour of the ...”

“... and tragedy are of equal access. What doesn’t travel, at least beyond East Asia, is the escape hatch of religion at the end: redemption through ascesis rather than art, as in Proust, but beyond adepts of the cult of either, to no more effect. Powell’s work fits Moretti’s rule best. It is consistently the funniest English narrative of the last ...”