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“... bog.’ After his rediscovery, Roth took another thirty years to publish his second novel, A Star Shines over Mt Morris Park (1994), and during that time there was much speculation about the causes of his prolonged failure to write. A lot of it focused on Call It Sleep, which tells the story of a sensitive immigrant child growing up in Brooklyn and the ...”

“... quotation from the Revelations of St John: ‘And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and ...”

“... of lore, and the new ‘Megastore’ where culture and marketing are one, as exemplified by the Star Wars industry. Born to the old world (‘taste was my cultural capital, boiled down to a syrup’), John Seabrook, a critic at large for the New Yorker, wanders in the new, but this desert of ‘Nobrow’ – where the old ‘brow’ distinctions no longer ...”

“... success, to keep in with the Labour Left and the trade-union apparat. I used to read the Morning Star (which had changed its name from the Daily Worker to become, as one comrade put it, a version of the Daily Employee) attentively. The Vietnam Solidarity Campaign was denounced, because the Soviet Union ostensibly put its faith in the good offices of U ...”

“... with the mad scientists of musique concrète and spread into pop in ways that demanded either rock star-size funds – only the likes of Kate Bush could afford the first ‘computer musical instruments’ – or, in the case of hip-hop, dexterity and staying power with mixers and turntables. Cheaper units like the E-mu SP-1200, launched in 1987, made it ...”

“... elements – a letter to the author’s father, reminiscences of a dead sister, chats with Christopher Hitchens, tales of Oxford and the old New Statesman office, and so on. But fierce reading is what this book is about, and these other passages seem intrusive. It would have been enough to observe a good writer wrestling with material that clearly ...”

“... Minnelli, Mike Nichols, Rachel Roberts, Daphne Rye, Jean Simmons, and three of his wives, Sybil Christopher, Elizabeth Taylor and Susan Hunt. I particularly enjoyed the parenthesis Mr Ferris appended to Hugh Griffith’s name in the list of non-runners – ‘Hugh Griffith (who said no before he died)’ – clearing up, as it did, any confusion in the ...”

“... the interpretation eloquently enshrined in the great Lutyens Memorial published in 1950, where Christopher Hussey, in his 600-page biography, and A. S. G. Butler, in his three volumes of plans, plates and commentary, acclaimed our Ned as ‘the greatest artist in building whom Britain has produced’. Lutyens’s ...”

“... that makes her – like Thomas MacGreevy in the first and Georges Duthuit in the second – the star correspondent in this third volume of his letters. When he tuned in to the Duras broadcast, Beckett was fifty and felt that he was, so to speak, failing upward. ‘Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you ...”

“... documentary called The Mighty Micro was broadcast on ITV. Written and presented by the late Christopher Evans of the National Physical Laboratory, and based on his book of the same name, the series looked at the ways the world might be changed by the microcomputer revolution. The BBC responded with a more practically minded, educational series called ...”

“... ride. Nowadays, by those readers who know of him, he is likely to be thought of as a once-vaunted star of Thirties legend who disappeared into Marxist politics and never quite returned – or, rather, who did return but who had in the meantime transmuted from vivacious satirist to plodding bore. Upward’s major work, A Spiral Ascent, came out in three parts ...”

“... Irving and Ellen Terry became the undisputed first couple of the British stage. After Irving’s star waned, and even more after his death in 1905, Terry extended her range, not least into the work of her correspondent Bernard Shaw. She died, a national treasure, in 1928. The succeeding generation followed their parents into the business, though inevitably ...”

“... Bird, Ernie, Bert, the Count von Count, Sherlock Hemlock, the Cookie Monster – were created to star in a show that used the snappy grammar of television advertising to sell learning. In a brilliant parody of the absurdity of sponsorship, each show was sponsored by letters and numbers. ‘This episode of Sesame Street is brought to you by the letters X and ...”

“... white explorers said to have been hailed as gods – Francis Drake, Hernán Cortés, Captain Cook, Christopher Columbus, to name a few – acquired a new star in the mid-1970s, when Prince Philip vacationed off the coast of Tanna, in what was then the New Hebrides, aboard HMY Britannia. Ever since, a string of Englishmen ...”

“... attempt to keep their street cred, propose that Charlie act as a character witness for the sports star, and offer in return to ask the bankers for lenience. With his other hand, Croker orders layoffs at a food-processing plant in his empire, and thus indirectly ruins the life of Conrad Hensley. This young loser, pitched into hell, redeems himself by his ...”