“... and worst of all, was a California phenom, a national success, the literary darling of the young. The long knives were well due in making an appearance. Brautigan came from the Pacific Northwest, born in Tacoma, Washington in the winter of 1935. His childhood seems to have been appalling and he was reluctant to discuss it. He never knew his ...”

“... I find it too distressing to write down what the case means to me, when so many people believe the young man is simply a lost cause, a person in the grip of evil. The papers have been ringing asking for comment: the messages go to voicemail. Outside, buses pass in quick succession, the passengers reading their newspapers and seeming very sure of ...”

“... If​ you are British and no longer young, the title for a brand new Philip Larkin poem is liable to enter your head at least once a day. This morning it was ‘Order of Service’. It’s not as good as ‘High Windows’ or ‘Dockery and Son’, but it has the same doleful ebb. Searching in an old folder, I found an order of service for Larkin’s memorial at Westminster Abbey on 14 February 1986 ...”

“... The cuckoo lays her eggs in other birds’ nests, he tells us, and ‘another bird will raise her young.’ By exploiting a little-known hole in a text-editing program common to many large systems called Gnu-Emacs, the hacker is able to lay an egg-program in the computer’s operating system that hatches to grant him the privileges of a system ...”

“... of Colin and Caroline, holidaying in Venice, attracts the fascinated attention of the sadistic Robert, who has already nearly killed his wife during their sado-masochistic sexual sessions, and eventually succeeds in calmly murdering Colin. In The Innocent the engagement night of Leonard, the callow English hero, and his German lover Maria, is interrupted ...”

“... English; that if they could, they wouldn’t; that a book would be judged by its cover. My copy of Robert Lacey’s monumental work The Kingdom travelled safely inside the dust-jacket of Vincent Cronin’s Louis and Antoinette. Perhaps it was not the wisest choice, since Saudi Arabia has a few things in common with the Ancien Régime: but I was confident that ...”

“... strangers would be antiquarian: it was a relic from a time, not so long ago, when for the aspiring young the printed word, and that special kind of it called literature, was a medium not seriously challenged by any other. That time was surely gone, I thought, and printed literature now had a hard time claiming even parity with competing media like film, rock ...”

“... being aware of the great love between Frances and Ralph, and feeling a certain fascination, young as I was, because this didn’t seem exactly like what I’d heard in the current pop songs. It was a force which is unsentimentally documented here: I sit writing with my back to the log fire which crackles softly and flicks tongues of light into the ...”

“... staged a large Nauman show, and two moments stick in my memory. In the first instance I followed a young woman into a constrictive space lit in harsh yellow in which a male voice repeated ‘Get out of the room, get out of my mind.’ We listened together for several minutes, made uneasy by the situation; finally, as she left, she muttered under her ...”

“... stigma of his absent father’s insanity: the Ostjuden considered madness a curse from God. As a young man, Roth scorned their insularity and sought assimilation in the West, but later, as his life slipped into an alcoholic abyss, he began in his fiction to reconsider his childhood. Brody was the template for the small town called ‘B.’ in The Radetzky ...”

“... conch in Lord of the Flies; they sounded a challenge on the battlefield. And this is where young Roland’s ‘slug-horn’ finds its place. As the hero’s ‘slogan’ it is, as it were, the ‘mott’ – both ‘fanfare’ and ‘saying’ – through which he declares himself, in which his poem ends, and from which (‘See Edgar’s song in ...”

“... about its anxieties, distortions and deformations, was The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressel, which until the mid-1980s every trade unionist, Labour Party member and left-leaning student in Britain could safely be said to have read, or at least heard of. Then in 1984 everyone put it down and picked up Money. For the benefit of anyone too ...”

“... where he spent three years. Here he relished the elegant geometrical proofs of the mathematician Robert Simson, which contributed in some measure to the love of system so evident in The Wealth of Nations, and was intrigued by the moral philosophy of the Ulsterman Francis Hutcheson, an engaging and enthusiastic teacher whose demotion of the role of reason in ...”

“... and small, with the titled hostesses of whose hollow world he had become the pampered adept when young, with the old literary friends and young literary protégés whose work he endlessly overpraises, with his publishers, and with the admirers and reviewers of his own work once that has begun to appear in its full extent ...”

“... President returning from his morning jog in August 1993 accompanied by a troupe of bodyguards and young staffers. In the blunt words of a pseudonymous commentator on one of the e-mail chat-sites which cling barnacle-like to the Drudge Report, it showed a post-run young female ‘jiggling her tits’ and ...”