“... holes. So far, the novel’s most thoughtful reviewers – Cynthia Ozick in the New York Times and Michael Gorra in the New York Review of Books – have taken care to talk about both the story-strands and the anxieties about story in Middle C. But they have shied away from trying to answer their own big questions about the novel. Gorra summarises the plot ...”

“... but was sufficiently intrigued to jot down the name of this racketeer-cum-detective: Joseph Silver. A few weeks later – the serendipity of the archives – the name jumped out at him again. In 1903, Silver was in a court in Bloemfontein giving evidence about a break-in at a jewellery store. Certain details of the story suggested once more his ...”

“... member of the Conservative pantheon – Churchill, Thatcher, Disraeli – but the Liberal radical Joseph Chamberlain. As mayor of Birmingham in the 1870s, Chamberlain employed the techniques of municipal socialism to better the lives of its inhabitants, using compulsory purchase to establish efficient local monopolies in water and gas. The prospect of Irish ...”

“... built of solid dark mahogany and pictures of dead animals.’ A Secret Service chief disappears in Joseph Hone’s The Flowers of the Forest and ambiguous allegiances are disentangled in a quest across Europe, as well as back in time to the Cambridge of Philby – actually, to a stop on the Oxford to Cambridge line, on the assumption that Oxford, too, had its ...”

“... her of being out of touch with reality, her litigious skill far surpasses his. On the back flap of Michael Hofmann’s new edition, My First Wife is pitched as ‘a lightly fictionalised account of Wassermann’s own troubled marriage’. In 1898, Wassermann, a German Jew with a difficult childhood behind him (his father was a failed businessman who could ...”

“... Joseph Rykwert is unhappy about the current condition of architecture, the principal subject of his long career as a historian. In the conclusion to The Judicious Eye, he complains that ‘new imaging techniques made possible by information technology have allowed architects to shape their buildings without reference to the unavoidable orthogonalities of building or the routine repetition of windows, columns, beams and suchlike ...”

“... became even more marked: ‘For every reader of Henry James and D.H. Lawrence,’ the publisher Michael Joseph observed in 1925, ‘there are a hundred readers of Nat Gould and Ethel M. Dell.’ And if we look further forward into the interwar period, the peaks of the popular market become higher still, especially as represented by the thrillers of ...”

“... and knows that the great detective has committed a murder. The companion – memorably played by Joseph Calleia – is wearing a mike, and Heston is listening in from a short distance. They cross a bridge. Welles confesses, discovers the trick, gets angry, draws a gun on Calleia and shoots him. He is about to shoot Heston when Calleia, in a last gasp before ...”

“... not more real, then more unmanageable, harder for the mind to lay hold of, to borrow a phrase from Joseph Conrad. I think Scorsese wants us to feel a sympathy for Sheeran that I, for one, am a long way from feeling, but what if both he and his daughter are right? What if the world is as dangerous as he thinks it is, and as fully devoted to power and protection ...”

“... I had my eye on – probably all appalled to be mentioned in each other’s company, and by me: Joseph Brodsky, Tom Paulin and, most intimately though I knew him least, Ian Hamilton. When I sent him a copy of my first book, I realised I’d even purloined his initials for my title. I wasn’t of an age to have been reading, never mind submitting to, his ...”

“... came the film version of Bright Lights, Big City, an appalling adaptation with wholesome munchkin Michael J. Fox in the lead. Like the film of Less than Zero, it was neutered by Hollywood’s supine acquiescence in Nancy Reagan’s demand that movies and television should not ‘glorify’ drug-taking. The jagged blackness of the original text was ...”

“... of a brush. The glance at Voltaire, the mention of Luther and the Enlightenment, all indicate, as Joseph Frank says, a crafty parody of advanced Russian thought. Fyodor Pavlovich is not an intellectual, but he knows how intellectuals talk. But of course he is up to other mischief as well. He is teasing his son, he is mocking both doubt and faith, both literal ...”

“... to broach too obviously the ethics of personal responsibility. Had not her ally and mentor Keith Joseph seen his own leadership aspirations shrivel in the aftermath of his notorious Edgbaston speech? When Joseph addressed the Edgbaston Conservative Association at Birmingham’s Grand Hotel on 19 October 1974, the ...”

“... la Musique’, Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress’, Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March), public music as a backdrop to private musings better still. Eastbourne, (August) Bank Holiday – ‘the English ferragosto’, Montale domesticates it in a letter – a country taking its ease, luxuriating in ...”

“... of working for his own ends: ‘Some friends think,’ he wrote to the Birmingham merchant Joseph Sturge, ‘that my exertions on this subject are to promote my own interests and on that account I have not given the subject impartial consideration.’ Stephen Lushington, the dashing cricketer-jurist who represented the black men Louis Lecesne and John ...”