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“... shore’. The Blot begins with a sleazily alluring noirish set-piece. Bruno is welcomed into the wood-panelled, book-lined study of the property developer, Köhler, ‘a balding sprite in a blue velvet dinner jacket’. He is served fine Scotch, and is soon winning tens of thousands of euros. Lethem deftly sketches the movements of the game, slowly cranking ...”

“... personality covers a multitude of offences’, and this remained the case throughout his life. Ian Collins’s engagingly partisan biography conveys qualities not easily evoked, the appeal of a character whose default mode was happiness and who, if he had a tendency to ‘put his own interests first’ and to be ‘unreliable in an emergency’, had a care ...”

“... cent to 5 per cent. Confiscation and settlement alone, however, did not secure the Ascendancy. As Ian McBride emphasises, the Franco-Jacobite threat was temporarily removed in 1713, when France recognised the Protestant succession as part of the Treaty of Utrecht. Paving the way for the Anglo-French alliance of 1716-31, Utrecht allowed the consolidation of ...”

“... above the lip – this explains the philtrum – and wipes its mind clean. The unborn narrator of Ian McEwan’s new novel, Nutshell, isn’t omniscient but has formidable mental powers, able to analyse, synthesise and, necessarily, use language. He also has tastes, preferences, opinions, all of which logically depend on something he hasn’t ...”

“... film, A Hard Day’s Night; an essay by Eula Biss referring to Paul McCartney and ‘Norwegian Wood’; McCartney sporting a man bun during his lockdown vacation; rave reviews for McCartney’s new lockdown solo album; various reflections on the fiftieth anniversary of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass; various reflections on the fortieth ...”

“... arms, dress, lodging, medium of exchange to line, light and shade, colour, clay including glass, wood, stone, glass in windows, schools of painting in natural history, landscape, human figure. This scheme ends, in the letter: ‘I’ve no more time today.’ The exposure and also the self-exposure are quite evident. Yet that range, and indeed an even wider ...”

“... With no background, loyalties or long-term future in the NCB (or indeed even in Britain), Ian MacGregor typifies the abrasive commercialism of new-style public-sector management heads. (Ironically this Florida voter, with his anti-union reputation, admiration for Tory economics, and even greater private wealth than Thatcher, was brought to Britain by ...”

“... polished and recombined them prolifically: a further eight books came out in the 1980s. Norwegian Wood, an uncharacteristically realistic love story, became a huge bestseller in 1987. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, published in three volumes in 1994-95, brought a warmer embrace from the Japanese literary establishment, which had previously filed him among ...”

“... to those who know nothing else about its author and to some who don’t usually read poetry. Ian Hamilton edited a selection of Lewis’s work, and there is a good biography by John Pikoulis. But his achievement has been hard to focus on. He moved quickly as a poet, and the poetry he wrote while on home service is markedly different from that written ...”

“... sighing under impervious stars. You want to tarry inside the ports of call on the album sleeves: wood-panelled saloon bar, modern apartment, skyscraper’s embrace. And, behind the endless itinerary of glamorous jetset destinations, the key topography at the heart of it all: the space of recording itself.It’s maybe no coincidence that Sinatra’s take on ...”

“... gay writer Armistead Maupin, and therefore not self-consciously posing), Rita Hayworth, Natalie Wood, Marlene Dietrich (drawn while posing, clearly), Simon Callow, John Gielgud and Ian McKellen. (My husband, David, incidentally, is related to Dietrich – on his mother’s side.) The screenwriters don’t include Dorothy ...”

“... correspondent; he argues in Museum without Walls that taking up such a job helped destroy Ian Nairn, the pugnacious, melancholic writer and broadcaster who is his most obvious precursor. It’s telling that this book doesn’t appear courtesy of the Architectural Association or any of the other publishers you might have expected to show an ...”

“... from Frances Sheridan, William Chaigneau and Thomas Amory to create a readership for these novels. Ian Campbell Ross’s superbly informative introduction to ‘Fiction to 1800’ creates a persuasive argument for a political relevance and a coherent tradition in the early Irish novel. Ross includes an excerpt from Tristram Shandy, less on the basis of ...”

“... thin puce belfries’ of the Third. Guided by the producer Douglas Cleverdon, Under Milk Wood and Beckett’s All That Fall came into being; and drama thrived – the careers of N.F. Simpson, Pinter and Stoppard were nurtured there. Desmond Shawe-Taylor wrote in the New Statesman that ‘the whole musical landscape’ was ‘likely to be transformed ...”

“... the theatrical sense: he did his degree in drama). In between, in 1987, he’d published Norwegian Wood, which sold two million copies in Japan. These books were obviously fun, and eerily recognisable (someone wittily rechristened the first ‘The Big Sheep’). For the young Murakami, who used to like to tell people that his vocation as a novelist came to him ...”