“... thought very funny at the time when Bernard Levin in the Spectator hung the Foreign Secretary’s service on the Hoylake Urban District Council round his neck. But Lloyd was no Pooterish aspirant, with absurd social pretensions, to the inner circle of Tory grandees. Knowing well enough that Macmillan referred to him as ‘a middle-class lawyer from ...”

“... his preposterous spider’s web of debt and counter-debt when the man who yearned to emulate him, Robert Maxwell, failed to achieve the same thing in a not dissimilar situation? Mr Shawcross records more than once that one of the few things capable of ruffling Murdoch’s cool temper was the suggestion that there was something in common between him and ...”

“... ranks, he had enlisted under the compulsion of hunger and unemployment. He had never forgiven the Service the fact of its feeding him.’ The woman Garland loves, Thea Mayven, comes from the Mearns and could plausibly be taken to be a precursor of Chris Guthrie. Like Gibbon, she has mixed feelings about her origins: ‘In Scotland, in the little farm where ...”

“... we can’t altogether accept the claims of his literary Muse, who allows him some felicities – Robert Flaherty was ‘like an Irish Bishop who had turned gangster’ – but more often lets him flounder (‘She was a neat chick’, of a Czech actress of the Thirties), we can at least salute the book’s utter transparency and lack of guile about both ...”

“... but as classy and educational, shown in the Masterpiece Theatre strand of the Public Broadcasting Service (as were those other great English classics Morse, Prime Suspect and Midsomer Murders). Upstairs, Downstairs, Cooke explains at the beginning, ‘follows the life of a London family through the reign of Edward VII. He was the big bearded monarch who had a ...”

“... looked like laundry baskets but weren’t. The railway companies operated a discreet distribution service. Passengers travelling from Liverpool Street to Cambridge were unaware that a consignment of corpses was regularly hitched to their train. There were limits: in 1858 the master of a London workhouse was convicted of selling human remains for personal ...”

“... and lying-stories and two-penny poets’ in his privy, and many texts were ‘pressed into general service’, as Margaret Spufford put it in Small Books and Pleasant Histories (1981), as toilet paper. Books were pulled apart to serve in the binding and endpapers of later books, the pages of an unwanted Bible perhaps padding the spine of an unholy prose ...”

“... write any poems until the autumn of 1914. Thinking over their genesis afterwards, his friend Robert Frost commented that ‘the decision he made in going into the army helped him make the other decision in form.’ This is both a simple material explanation and perhaps also a piece of soul-searching. Frost knew that the more Thomas believed he could ...”

“... the candidates for the presidency who have won their honourable eminence by great and unflagging service.’ The following Christmas, Debs, the perennial Socialist Party candidate, was released with a commuted sentence on the orders of President Warren Harding.Debs won 3.4 per cent of the vote in that election, but Donald Trump is currently polling ahead of ...”

“... choirboys and girls of the 1940s. Can Modern Baptists be true to life? We may hope so. Carl Robert Pickens is occasionally called Bobby, but more often Mr Pickens, in a Dickensian, Pickwickian way. He has many problems. He has just been sacked from his job as assistant manager at the Sonny Boy Bargain Store in Tula Springs – partly because of the ...”

“... require of each that he shall make the same effort; that is, we demand of him the best service it is in his power to give.’ What remains obscure is who ‘we’ are. Bellamy is an enthusiast for solidarity. Zamyatin in 1924 made ‘we’ the pronoun of repression. Bellamy doesn’t perceive that solidarity, like anything else, can be a ...”

“... I heard a Portishead song being played in Spud-U-Like, and every weekend since 1988 motorway service stations on the M6 and M62 have been haunted by clubbers who spend the nights journeying between venues in Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool and the Midlands. Pop music has also stormed the citadel of literary fiction, and characters in novels such as Karline ...”

“... A twice-fired former sheriff and university security officer, he worked for AT&T’s security service. Like the other guards protecting Olympic Centennial Park, he was hired at the minimum wage. The bomb fragments found at his home, however, may only have been payment in kind, souvenirs of the explosion rather than evidence pointing to its perpetrator. In ...”

“... business, now called Atlas and to become eventually ‘the largest de-greasing and de-scaling service of its kind in the world’. His father’s secretary remembers that, at 18, Denis ‘was already the man he was to become’. Common sense, says Carol, has always been his most valuable asset, along with ‘pragmatism and homespun logic’. Two of his ...”

“... in ‘this position of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction’. He has a job at a service station, or as a janitor or a delivery man, with the prospect of many more years in this unwriterly posture, so unlike the situation of the well-known writers he admires. And after these destructive years of parenting there was an alcoholic hiatus, ten ...”