“... defence from its British publisher, John Calder (who claimed to discern in Burroughs the James Joyce of our day), Naked Lunch went on to become a terrific post-Chatterley best-seller. The Place of Dead Roads is published with a grant from the Arts Council: a double seal of Establishment approval and minority sales ...”

“... read about game theory and evolution, about genetics and fluid dynamics. I read about Jesse James, Bonnie and Clyde, Joseph McCarthy. I read the service manual for my parents’ ’63 Saab …’ And so on. And yet, a few years ago, Everett suddenly found himself writing ‘black’ novels – or, at least, novels about black novels. Erasure (2001) was ...”

“... Life force of every plant; You whose reality We’ve honoured to this day in blind faith, grant Some token of yourself, and if Our love can’t bring you into being Then let this man’s brutality.’ So saying She looked up at the foam-curtained cliff And in the rainbow glaze Saw suddenly the bright Voluptuous shimmering figure of the ...”

“... into second place across a swathe of strongly pro-Brexit Labour seats. The electoral system will grant them few seats but a powerful grievance. Yet Labour won. Tory rule is over.The campaign was trivial. Neither party addressed the £20 billion of cuts to unprotected public services baked into current spending. The primary mode was assertion: Labour claimed ...”

“... and John Barrymore, thought him more remarkable than any of them. On screen, his name appeared as James Stewart, and he worked hard at every detail. He was a canny businessman. Before the Second World War, he invested in a small airline. Soon after the war, taking advantage of the new freedom from studio contracts, he was one of the first actors to arrange to ...”

“... were Molly and Desmond MacCarthy, Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, the Woolfs, Lytton Strachey and Forster. Mary Hutchinson and Sydney Waterlow were also invited but fell by the wayside. Even by Bloomsbury standards it was an exclusive set. The members were all related by blood or marriage or, which weighed more heavily ...”

“... get so many laughs. When I saw the first of the two movies I thought I was watching a bit of the James Bond franchise mangled by Quentin Tarantino. But the memory of Jackson in Pulp Fiction was leading me astray. His performance in Kingsman is closer to us in time, and the disorderly presiding spirit is more like that of Mel Brooks. What else could turn ...”

“... before the Supreme Court, Lord Kerr, one of 11 justices hearing the appeal, looked pointedly at James Eadie QC, who was responding on behalf of the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union. Kerr accused Eadie of ‘building quite an edifice on the phrase “from time to time”’. It was a fair enough point, and it came none too soon, given that ...”

“... In​ autumn 2000, the critic, memoirist and biographer James Atlas brought forth a Life of Saul Bellow that augured to be the literary event of the season, a crowning glory for author and subject. Bellow: A Biography was Atlas’s highly anticipated successor to his wunderkind biography of the brilliant, bedevilled Delmore Schwartz, whose combustible presence served as the inspiration for Von Humboldt Fleisher in Bellow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Humboldt’s Gift ...”

“... of the shadow of death; make a joyful noise; go from strength to strength . . . The 1611 King James Authorised Version of the Book of Psalms – and of course of the entire Bible – is so deep in the English language that we no longer know when we are repeating its phrases. Inextricable from the beliefs and practices of its faithful for four hundred ...”

“... to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ The novelist James Robertson loves this; he complains that almost nothing is said about culture in the referendum campaign, about the things that really differentiate one nation from another. But I don’t agree with Fletcher. You have to make the laws too, or nothing will ...”

“... days were approaching, or had already arrived. Some hoped witnessing a supernatural event might grant them religious certainty, confirming their faith amid the turbulence of the Reformation. The events must have been familiar enough that the usual pattern of an exorcism would be known, but still strange enough to attract a crowd.Brossier came closer than ...”

“... for later. Tuesday 1 January: SpentRéveillon with Jean-Claude, Annick and friend. Clive James on BBC1 after midnight. Next day, Brasserie lunch in place du Châtelet. Taxi to Musée d’Orsay. Like many other furious people, found it closed because of bank holiday. Without warning, went to call on Méraud Guevara, rue de Lille behind the ...”

“... this necessary person, regretting but never forgetting that he needed to be pleased. When Henry James sent him a copy of The Spoils of Poynton he told Garnett he imagined ‘with pain the man in the street trying to read it’; ‘the delicacy and tenuity of the thing are amazing,’ but how could it hope to sell? Jessie pretended to admire it, but he was ...”

“... to ‘beastly’, his ‘constipation’ to ‘indigestion’ and his ‘God grant’ to ‘I only hope’. His own labours came to an end with the five volumes of letters in the Tusitala edition of 1924, since when innumerable further letters have turned up. Plenty of need, then, for a new edition, and the task was undertaken as far back ...”