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“... transparent, had arrived at a point where most of their activity was secret and mysterious. Enter Michael Lewis. Flash Boys is a number of things, one of the most important being an exposition of exactly what is going on in the stock market; it’s a one-stop shop for an explanation of high-frequency trading (hereafter, HFT). The book reads like a ...”

“... remarkable one, in which Powell pays tribute to the ‘insight’ and ‘courage’ of his fellow Black Country MP John Stonehouse, soon to become postmaster general and then regarded as a coming man in the Labour Party, perhaps even a future leader. Stonehouse had denounced as ‘a canker’ the campaign by local Sikh bus conductors to be allowed to wear ...”

“... of the kings of France, trade routes to Islam, routes of Viking invasions – thus, so, black and white, and not otherwise. What lies behind it all? History of this kind maximises one’s information, minimises doubt. Its authors are pressed into shorthand statements, which often invite one tacitly to assume that things have not changed very much ...”

“... god lives, Gather on willow-ground The blood that was shed, moon-coolness; All roads flow into black decay. Under the golden boughs of the night and stars Sister’s shadow sways through the silent grove, To greet the spirits of the heroes, the bleeding heads; And softly the dark pipes of autumn sound in the reeds. O prouder sorrow! You brazen altars, The ...”

“... called the Violet Quill had formed, and its members – Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books whose examination of gay life, though often programmatic, was still ...”

“... the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, made the ecoterrorist a pop cultural staple. The nadir was Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear (2004), in which a group of eco-extremists fake climate disasters for political ends. Crichton appended various denialist tracts to the text, though its paranoid reading of climate politics was a few years ahead of the ...”

“... Dr Faustus is a morality play or a parody of one, whether The Massacre at Paris is a tragedy or a black comedy, seems to derive from Marlowe’s own uncertainty about which side his bread was ultimately buttered, a social double-agent’s desire to keep his options open. Such preferment as Marlowe did receive was as a more literal kind of ...”

“... These limitations become more apparent when Hitchens writes about the Left. He tears into Michael Foot for his ‘treacly exaggerations’, his awful sentimentality, his Beaverbrook-worship and his ‘glutinous style’. Fine. But the fact that his general angle of attack on Foot is from the left, and his judgment that Foot ‘has never been otherwise ...”

“... tales’ of humiliation and withdrawal (‘The Shaker Bridal’, say, or ‘The Minister’s Black Veil’), as doomstruck as one of Melville’s fables of embarkation (the first chapter of The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, entitled ‘A mute goes aboard a boat on the Mississippi’ – where there is no dialogue, only a series of hand-lettered signs ...”

“... undertones of decay. Taking literally the references in Shakespeare’s sonnets to a mistress ‘black as hell’, Burgess made the Dark Lady of his story a voluptuous East Indian who, after seducing the dramatist, inspired the tragic plays of his maturity by giving him a dose of syphilis. A.L. Rowse, meanwhile, edited the sonnets themselves. Already the ...”

“... its legacy: ‘The flu resculpted human populations more radically than anything since the Black Death,’ she writes. ‘It influenced the course of the First World War and, arguably, contributed to the second. It pushed India closer to independence, South Africa closer to apartheid, and Switzerland to the brink of civil war. It ushered in universal ...”

“... In​ Peeping Tom (1960), Michael Powell’s brutal parable on the nature of film, a woman confronts a young cameraman, Mark, in his darkroom. Mrs Stephens, who is blind, realises there’s something disturbing about Mark, something linked to his compulsive filmmaking. ‘I’m listening to my instinct now. And it says: “All this filming isn’t healthy ...”

“... outside my window on purpose to freak me out’ – this, it transpired, was the silhouette of two black streetlights, one superimposed on the other. I spent two weeks adding 143 words to my novel, about peeing next to Rob Roy’s grave, feeling further from coherence with every draft. Local news graphics of the virion floated through the air, along with ...”

“... to Charlie Stavros, ultimately his most reliable friend, strikes up with crazy Jill and crazier black Skeeter and literally walks through fire. Rabbit is rich (1980) is the account of a Rabbit made comfortable when a long-reconciled Janice inherits her father Fred’s motor dealership, which he has enriched with a Toyota agency. Rabbit speculates, at the ...”

“... Clark, the tycoon James Goldsmith and the zoo-keeper John Aspinall arranged a dinner with Conrad Black, owner of the Telegraph, to try to persuade him to order his (entirely independent) editor to stop backing Heseltine. Black refused, but we are left in no doubt that it is at dinner parties such as these that important ...”