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“... aplomb in the world. As the recent chairman of Did you see? he smoothly concealed any distaste he may have felt for the more freakish performers on his viewing panel; and as the one-time pillar of Panorama he was not too pompous to play himself in Yes, Prime Minister and ask questions about the British sausage. His life has been pitched at an agreeable social ...”

“... in the fields. According to an authoritative estimate as many as ten or eleven thousand Hauranis may go to Palestine temporarily in search of work in a really bad year ... the number of Hauranis illegally in the country at the present time is roughly 2,500.’ So while the Royal Commission said clearly that the amount of permanent Haurani illegal immigration ...”

“... omens of prosperity or ruin to come are sought in every change ... any of the world’s details may contain the one thing that above all else you will regret not knowing.’ In Moo Smiley moves from the claustrophobic confines of family life to the wide open spaces of a Midwestern agricultural college, trading dark drama for four hundred pages of proficient ...”

“... effort much greater than would be required if you had plumped for a Pinter or an Ibsen or a David Hare. When we hear, for instance, that Aeschylus’ rival Phrynichus was particularly noted for his choreographies, or learn from Peter Wilson in Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy that the shawm (aulos) which always accompanied a performance came ...”

“... have come as something of a surprise to Chaucer or Pope. For liberals such as Henry James and David Lodge, it represents a venture into individual consciousness of unique worth – so valuable, in fact, that in this new novel Lodge suspects it may be the summum bonum. ‘Consciousness’ – the very term has an ...”

“... posters or School Prints, work by Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Paul Nash. As early as May 1930, another editor, Betjeman’s mentor Philip Morton Shand, part of whose enviable brief was to travel Europe in search of articles to translate and buildings to publish, but who also pursued his own parallel interests in wine and food, ...”

“... and fill them with the delusion that they knew things when they did not. The Pharaoh may have had a point, but Plato was not above being perverse, especially when it came to popular culture. It is also clear that he intended the anecdote as an anecdote, not as a programme of reform. It is a commonplace that writing began through the use of ...”

“... have a relationship extending beyond their weekly group therapy. The youngest of the trio, David Mummery, was born in 1939 – an ominous year for London. He is a writer, obsessed with ‘the London under London’. In 1964, he began researching the city’s ‘lost’ tube lines and stations whose maps exist only in Masonic libraries. Mummery has ...”

“... and social change. Recently a number of younger historians – Kathleen Birk, Keith Neilson, and David French in his first book British Economic and Strategic Planning 1905-1915 – have begun to consider some of the key questions of finance and economics. But until now nobody has tried to put all this specialist work together. The last oeuvre de synthèse ...”

“... essay in Harper’s magazine the young novelist Jonathan Franzen declares Pynchon a personal hero. David Foster Wallace moves beyond admiration to adulation – if not, to put it more plainly, outright imitation. It is, in fact, a virtuoso performance that has eclipsed its progenitor: Wallace out-Pynchons Pynchon, and his third book, Infinite Jest, ...”

“... juxtaposition between a dying woman and her undying cells, and retells the fable. Rebecca Skloot may be just the latest in a long line, but The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks will surely stand as the definitive account. There’s no simple moral to the tale, but the book shows how even the best intentions may be warped ...”

“... Visiting Perth in May 1922, D.H. Lawrence struck one May Gawlor, who met him at a literary picnic, as a cross between ‘a reddish bearded able-bodied seaman and a handyman at the backdoor’, so that she wondered ‘how this rather shabby, slightly coarse, far from spruce and tidy little man could possibly have caused such a flutter, apart from his books ...”

“... In​ 1975 David Bowie was in Los Angeles pretending to star in a film that wasn’t being made, adapted from a memoir he would never complete, to be called ‘The Return of the Thin White Duke’. This dubious pseudonymous character was first aired in an interview with Rolling Stone’s bumptious but canny young reporter Cameron Crowe; it soon became notorious ...”

“... end of Kipling. When copyright runs out, his work will be published extensively in paperback, and may or may not be read. Kipling is a writer between readerships: no longer anything like as popular as he once was, but not quite unpopular enough to be included in courses on Modernism or The Short Story. His reputation ...”

“... turns out that as seen from the private quarters the West Wing barely registers. Of course, that may have been the point of these conversations, which Clinton set up with his old friend Branch (they had been roommates together while working on George McGovern’s disastrous presidential campaign of 1972) in order to record for posterity a real-time overview ...”