“... Fraser might have mixed feelings is The Gift: New Writing for the NHS, an anthology edited by David Morley (Stride, £7.95). The shortest contribution is ‘the underfunder’s utopia’ by Tom Leonard, an asthmatic poet: ‘the state hospital/ with one bed/always full/always efficient’. David Morley is the director ...”

“... eating bananas; nine bananas, in fact, five baked and four raw. He had invited his valet Charlie Jones to join him. The valet, who later confessed that he had Chloroformed his employer, refused: ‘I told him that I was afraid of bananas and wouldn’t try any.’ Dr Curry, who attended the body, found that the 84-year-old man had died of natural ...”

“... it has, nonetheless, brought out an annual of its own, The Guardian Year 2002, edited by David McKie (Atlantic, £12.99). And what a year it’s been, seeing among so much else not only the poaching of ace columnist Rod Liddle from his frustratingly behind-the-scenes role at the Today programme but the launch of the tabloid Saturday Review and a new ...”

“... the mole-inspired disasters, Benedict Cumberbatch as Smiley’s diligent gofer, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, David Dencik, Ciarán Hinds as high-ups in British intelligence, all candidates for the ultimately declared position of mole – and the director’s elegant hand is everywhere. Tomas Alfredson is best known for his ...”

“... Part​ of what makes Owen Jones such a phenomenally successful figure by left-of-Labour standards is his ability to be several things at once. He is both insider, reporting back to ‘us’ about what ‘they’ think, and outsider, as shocked and angry about it as ‘we’ might be. He was brought up in Sheffield, Falkirk and Stockport and speaks in a sharp Mancunian accent, but he is also an Oxford graduate, with all the connections that can entail ...”

“... across the Daily Telegraph on 13 June were pictures of the eminent novelist in sports kit that David Beckham might not be ashamed to be seen in. Pilates, we learn, has changed Martin Amis’s life. It’s got him onto the health pages of the Telegraph, for one thing. ‘It’s a bit girly, but it really works,’ he enthuses to Victoria Lambert as she ...”

“... It’s also the only one of Clancy’s books to have been graced with a review in the LRB. David Rieff concluded: ‘America loves Colonel North and Colonel North must love Red Storm Rising. I would ban it if I could’ (LRB, 3 September 1987). I don’t suppose the presence of Jack Ryan would have eased his mind much. Ryan’s career has been filled ...”

“... was to make major headlines and be more than a support act for the clash of the Davids. With David Cameron boyishly – and buoyantly – installed in the middle of the opposition front bench, the time was at last ripe for overthrowing Kennedy. If the conspirators had waited too much longer, there was always the danger that they might have found coverage ...”

“... as something that, being broken, was only fit for abuse.’ In his new novel, Pilcrow, Adam Mars-Jones slips in a quick reference to ‘One Arm’, when the narrator, a disabled boy called John Cromer, tells us that he and a schoolfriend ‘wept together over “One Arm” – Jimmy’s tears the more surprising since he knew the story so ...”

“... Joyce estate is one of the fiercest in the business. Last year, the Irish Times told the story of David Fennessy, a 23-year-old Irish composer studying in Scotland who asked for permission to use 18 words from Finnegans Wake in a three-minute choral piece. Stephen Joyce refused. ‘My wife and I don’t like your music,’ he said. In the recent case, the ...”

“... Factory: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank (Simon and Schuster, £12.99), David Plotz investigates the Repository for Germinal Choice that was founded in California in 1980 by Robert Graham, an ‘eccentric millionaire’, and closed in 1999. The only prize-winner to fess up to having donated was William Shockley, who invented the ...”

“... just look what happened to Star Wars. Star Wars, along with Jaws, is regularly cited, not least by David Thomson, as the film that ‘killed the movies’. Glenn Kelly’s answer, in his introduction to A Galaxy Not So Far Away: Writers and Artists on 25 Years of ‘Star Wars’ (Allison and Busby, £9.99), is: ‘Get over it, Dad.’ This selective quotation ...”

“... to take his comrade’s place at roll call, much as Charles Clarke has done following the lovesick David Blunkett’s escape from Cabinet – a strange business on many levels, Blunkett’s repressive record as home secretary aside. For a start, it’s hard to imagine a more venial form of corruption than merely speeding along someone’s visa application. And ...”

“... action figures exist only as bits and bobs in cyberspace’. The man responsible for the site, David Gauntlett, who teaches at the Institute of Communications Studies in Leeds, is clearly a bit of a Giddens fan: note the description of Modernity and Self-Identity as ‘outstanding’. You can also get (if you download and print them) Theory.org.uk ...”

“... cadillac, alongside the cans of Diet Coke.The LRB has received a sheet of puffs for The Chief, David Nasaw’s Life of William Randolph Hearst (Gibson Square, £9.99), including one from Conrad Black in the Scotsman. That would be the same Conrad Black who wrote the book’s foreword. A helpful yellow post-it note reads: ‘FYI Conrad Black in the ...”