“... George ran for mayor of New York and finished ahead of Teddy Roosevelt, though behind the Tammany Hall candidate. Henry George Foundations still exist in London, Melbourne and his native Philadelphia. Liberal Democrats in Britain continue to hanker after George’s single land tax to replace all other taxes, as do some American conservatives. All the ...”

“... could feel stranded out there on that finger of land. I got up and looked at a bookshelf in the hall outside the room. It had books of Norman’s going all the way back to the first Rinehart edition of The Naked and the Dead. This is what a writer’s life comes to, I thought, slightly spooked: a few rows of books, the writer working and sleeping in the ...”

“... was once a model for boys who thought cowboys put decency back into the world. On 20 July 2012, James Holmes, after dyeing his hair a kind of purple, went to a midnight screening of the Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises at the Century movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado, and sprayed the crowd with bullets, killing 12 and injuring 70. He had earlier thought ...”

“... in the Promised Land, Britain kept the promise made in 1917 by its Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, in the Declaration that bears his name, ‘to favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. While nurturing the ‘national home’, a term as deliberately vague as Palestinian ‘autonomy’ is today, Britain ...”

“... old lady’s hands, lying idle in a lap somewhere.1 June. Coming to the end of English Pastoral, James Rebanks’s second volume. It’s harder to read than A Shepherd’s Life, with the central section about the onset of factory farming not easy to take. Thankfully, though, in his own life at any rate the tide turns and Rebanks regains his grip on ...”

“... Harris) to admit that a sentence about a character paring his fingernails was inspired by James Joyce. Admit it he does not: ‘The phrase you quote is an unpleasant coincidence.’ Cumberbatch’s sweating intensifies. His jumper has been nibbled by the only moths on earth that are beneath his idol’s notice. Vladimir toys sardonically with the rook ...”

“... she became involved in the Rational Dress Society, presiding over a meeting in Westminster Town Hall. She ran the society’s magazine for the next two years. ‘The Rational Dress Society,’ their pamphlet read, ‘protests against the introduction of any fashion in dress that either deforms the figure, impedes the movement of the body, or in any way ...”

“... McGreevy wrote, are frequently depicted in the pursuit of pleasure, at the circus or music-hall, at race meetings, or simply in conversation with each other. Yet often the expression on their faces suggests restraint, thoughtfulness, an inner discipline. Outwardly they so obviously belong to a more primitive state of society than has ever been depicted ...”

“... isn’t like that,’ they’re off the hook. 20 February. We’re gradually assembling a class: James Corden, who’s plump and funny and at the audition entirely takes charge; Sacha Dhawan, an Asian boy from Manchester who complains that all he’s ever offered these days are Muslim terrorists or Afghan refugees; Jamie Parker, who is to play Scripps the ...”

“... the movie, a low gasp of recognition was involuntarily released into the crowded darkness of the hall. If the film was a western, or a war film, another form of preview, which I loved, was a sand table that would be set out in the foyer of the cinema, re-creating the high sierras and canyons of some unknown land, or the battlefields of Flanders with their ...”

“... horses. Dick Haymes was a brutal, abusive, manipulative drunk. Her brief marriage to the director James Hill was a last misconceived attempt to find calm and stability away from the film business. It was typical of her that she had chosen a man determined to reestablish her career. She was divorced from him by the judge who had married her to Orson Welles 18 ...”

“... have many distinguished old boys though one which it never seems to acknowledge was the critic James Agate. This reticence may be on account of Agate’s well-known propensity to drink his own piss. 13 June. Three police acquitted in the case of Joy Gardner who died after being gagged with 13 inches of tape, a restraining belt and leg irons. It’s not ...”

“... is water retention). But now, providing I don’t look at myself in the mirror in the hall, I begin to see (as in feel) that it doesn’t matter so much. As I write there is a world refugee crisis. I’ve never had to cope with that. That little cancer in my lung, and the growing forest of fibrotic alveoli will kill me, but something would ...”

“... showmen,’ she replied. ‘In even their most carefree moments and their most abandoned moods,’ James Thurber noted, ‘there was scarcely ever the casual ring of authentic gaiety. They did not know how to invite gaiety. They twisted its arm, got it down, and sat on its chest.’An early short story, ‘Winter Dreams’, from the collection All the Sad ...”

“... stands in for Portnoy’s Complaint – and The Counterlife (1986). Theroux followed Roth into a hall of mirrors from which it is hard to find the exit. Roth’s rationale for this navel-gazing form of metafiction invoked the example of fine art, where self-portrait is a pre-eminent genre: what could be more natural than using as subject matter the material ...”