“... before he knew that the FBI had seized all Black’s hard disks: Deedes, indeed, is a bit like Robert Graves’s Claudius, surviving every situation while more powerful figures are pole-axed all around him because he plays the buffoon so successfully that no one can see in him a future emperor. Born in 1913, Deedes grew up in a castle that was sold off for ...”

“... of fable, discreetly foreshadowed in the first pages of the book. Frédéric and a friend, when young, visited a brothel in their native town, but they were not able to enjoy its pleasures because Frédéric got scared and ran off. His friend had to leave, too, because Frédéric had the money. The last words of the novel describe a late conversation ...”

“... Katherine Mansfield’s​ short story ‘Bliss’ is a jewel-like study of a young woman, Bertha, poised unknowingly at a moment of crisis in her life. (It’s interesting not least for what it prefigures of Mrs Dalloway.) Bertha, preparing for a dinner party she will give that evening, arranges the fruit she has ordered: tangerines, ‘apples stained with strawberry pink ...”

“... of general scientific knowledge, the cinema’s achievements reach no higher than such biopics as Young Tom Edison (1940 – one of Mickey Rooney’s less memorable efforts), Madame Curie (1943, a weepy Greer Garson vehicle) and sub-standard science fiction. What Desmond has apparently taken from Hollywood with his ‘ciné’ style of narration is a fondness ...”

“... diarist Creevey says the top-heavy hero was ‘immensely cheered’ by thousands. After all, lusty young troopers were sometimes unhorsed in this fashion. It was an age of military dandyism like no other. Was there, then, a case for cracking down on the monstrous millinery of war? Was towering headgear really necessary to overawe the enemy? How many British ...”

“... 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 ...”