“... no coincidence that the first objects that fall from the incised stomachs of captured sharks in Peter Benchley’s Jaws are car parts: as Benchley points out at the novel’s outset, like some grotesque über-car the great white must perpetually keep moving. My sister then held up as evidence The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, in which ...”

“... an unsurprising consequence in stroke patients, as I now know. The doctors on the acute stroke ward at Charing Cross do rounds of their patients in the mornings. Despite all the machinery, or because of it, the constant measurement – heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen saturation – makes the atmosphere in hospital wards enervating. When Hugh was ...”

“... moral simplicities prove ambiguous or uncertain. The two heraldic supporters of Gertrude are first Peter, known as the Count, a Polish refugee, friend and former colleague of Guy; and Anne, college friend of Gertrude, recently emerged from 14 years in a convent. The Count is the only possible candidate for the ‘soldier’ of the title, and he becomes so only ...”

“... such a succession when young John Major first stood as a Conservative candidate for the Larkhill ward of Lambeth in 1964. The experience of living in rented rooms in Cold-harbour Lane, Brixton, after his father’s business had failed was still fresh. The fact of having left school early, with embarrassingly few qualifications, meant that Major was ...”

“... to draw a line between the sane and the insane. The forced admission of someone to a psychiatric ward is known as ‘sectioning’ because it’s done according to a section of the Mental Health Act, but the overtones of dividing, of cutting off, are unavoidable. The Shock of the Fall takes its readers to that line – which appears exactly halfway through ...”

“... ruin and general beastliness, not sure why good old Bob Mellish was being so rude to nice young Peter Tatchell. The vicious graffiti about Tatchell were gleefully reported: not so the more libellous graffiti about Mellish. None of this applies to Darlington. Here the Labour Movement, left and right, finds it quite easy to remain united – though members ...”

“... outside the restriction of their lives and are lost to themselves. Slouching towards Kalamazoo by Peter De Vries, is about sexual liberation and the 19th century’s heritage: its first half jokily replays the situation of The Scarlet Letter in a small Mid-Western town in the late 1950s. The narrator is Tony Thrasher, the precociously witty and allusive son ...”

“... American comic taletellers and versifiers, all born in the 1830 and 1840s: Bret Harte, Artemus Ward, Joel Chandler Harris and, lion among them, Mark Twain. With O. Henry, born a decade later, we are already moving out of the oral tradition, with its loose-limbed jogtrot rhythms and its shameless delight in red herrings and shaggy dogs, its weakness for ...”

“... of those who voted in his favour only: he is the representative of all the electors in his ward.’ Test it this way: suppose the Greater London electorate had voted the National Front into power, on a promise that they would run all the blacks out of town. Would one want to see the manifesto doctrine – suspect at the best of times, even in national ...”

“... you looking at me like that? And of course the question that trails us from playgroup to dementia ward: well, if you will go on like that, what else did you expect? But of course we’re not dealing with that kind of unexplained. The clue is on the cover: a person with popping eyes, flying through the air. This dictionary’s greatest fans will be people more ...”

“... while reminding voters that Stephens had called for the UK to stop arming Israel. Pollokshields ward has the highest concentration of Muslims in Scotland – 27.8 per cent. Many of those coming out of the madrasa shook Stephens’s hand and promised him their vote. But Umar Ali, an IT worker who had supported the SNP, was minded to switch to ...”

“... heart has stopped,’ he said. The first time, he injected in a forest and woke up on a hospital ward. He doesn’t know who found him. The second time, he overdosed in his room at the hostel and had to be shocked back to life. After his most recent overdose, Ryan was referred to the Enhanced Drug Treatment Service (EDTS), next to the Thistle, where those ...”

“... but heading for a psychotic breakdown, for the badlands of schizophrenia, a career on a back ward. To prevent this, the doctor moved the patient onto what were then called ‘major tranquillisers’, a group of drugs intended to combat thought-disorder and banish hallucinations and delusions.The next time I saw Dr G he forbade me to write – or, more ...”

“... Heaven and Hell’ excludes Leicester from heaven principally on the grounds of lust. After St Peter has interrogated him at length about his involvement in various murders, extortions and usurpations, he is almost persuaded by a show of repentance to admit him even so. St Peter threw open the gate and his Earlship most ...”

“... Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography is as much a history of characterisations of the city as a history of London itself. And although Ackroyd is most concerned with character in the sense of ‘a personality invested with distinctive attributes and qualities, by a novelist or dramatist’, readers of his previous writings will not be surprised to hear that many other meanings of the word also come into play – ‘distinctive features’, ‘essential peculiarity’, ‘nature, style’, certainly; but also ‘distinctive mark, evidence, or token’; ‘a cipher for secret correspondence’; and even ‘a cabbalistic or magical sign or emblem ...”