“... What is ‘earth’s biggest book store’? It’s American like every other biggest thing. But, nonsensically, a court case, settled on 21 October concluded that two book-retailers can legally trademark the ‘earth’s biggest’ claim. One is the Barnes and Noble octopus, with 25,000 employees, franchised outlets in every mall in North America and a $3 billion annual turnover ...”

“... Government dealings with the country’s agencies for culture and higher learning used to be determined by the arm’s-length principle. That is to say, much like an 18th-century patron, the ministry would give the Arts Council or the University Grants Committee a large sum of money, trusting that they would apply it to Britain’s best advantage. Better poetry and better education would happen ...”

“... Every summer, with the absence of Parliamentary news and the arrival of GCSE, A-level and degree results, the great education debate starts up again. This year’s is accompanied by two jeremiads: one from a politician, the other from a journalist. Both aim at a mass audience. All Must Have Prizes is promoted by its publisher as ‘the book every parent must read’; We Should Know Better is held to ‘chime in with the current collective mood of the nation in much the same way as Will Hutton’s bestselling The State of the Nation did last year ...”

“... them ‘immediately’. In this Arthur C. Clarke scenario, the reader will sit in his/her study in John O’ Groats, log onto the BLOC, order by keyboard a selection of the 141 items on ‘Shakespeare, William: Hamlet’, and hey-presto have them delivered at a super-fast baud rate to his/her PC. That is the Science Fiction version. The Real World ...”

“... the novelist to choose from. He could, for instance, have picked on the investigative journalist John Kenneth Turner, who travelled to Mexico in 1908 and discovered that Diaz’s wonderfully healthy economy was based on massive slavery and the slaughter of the Yaqui Indians. Turner wrote up his findings in a series of slashing articles later collected as the ...”

“... the Obscure resembles Dickensian black comedy turned absurdist, the epitaphic aspirations of a John Chivery in Little Dorrit chilled to the bone, then the receding acknowledgment of Hades-bound presences in the narrative coda of The Newcomes provides the textual obverse of Amy Dorrit’s confidence in closural inscription, which seems for her the ...”

“... And, one mutters, reviewers carp. For all this, Taylor has a critical parti pris. Like John Carey, whom he admires, he subscribes to the simplifying (and Ray-reversing) view that Thackeray is a one-book author. Or, as Carey brutally puts it: ‘Thackeray’s career as a leading novelist began and ended with Vanity Fair. After that it was downhill ...”

“... with two unpardonable offences to the estate. Jack, as Stone asserted, was not in fact the son of John London. His true father, Stone claimed, was a vagrant, 55-year-old, incorrigibly bigamous ‘itinerant Irish astrologer’ called William H. Chaney. Chaney and Jack’s mother, Flora Wellman, had a tempestuous and unhallowed alliance in 1874-75, during which ...”

“... of Fiction (1921). Having studied this ultra-Jamesian tract, the bright young Gerald Mills and John Boon determined that ‘viewpoint’ was the main ingredient in narrative and that their romances ‘should always be written from the heroine’s point of view, in order to promote identification and increase interest and suspense’. The ...”

“... by toe-curling choruses of ‘Happy Birthday’), hand-holding, embracing, chants (‘Hi, John!’). This is evidently necessary to create a structure for the incoming drunk in free fall or those whose sobriety is fragile. The structure is always there and always the same; a reassuringly solid thing in a dangerously liquid world. What is rarely boring ...”

“... In his autobiographical papers, Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynman?, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman, describes being piqued by an article in Science about how well bloodhounds can smell. Feynman hates not being best, and so he took time off from inventing the atom bomb (he was working at Los Alamos) to run an experiment. He had his wife handle certain coke bottles in an empty six-pack while he was out of the room for a couple of minutes ...”

“... Victorian biography has recently come in clusters. In the last decade there have been four authoritative biographies of Trollope; two of Dickens; two of Wilkie Collins; three of Stevenson (one down, two to come); and – with the present centennial haul – three of Tennyson. Given the huge expenditure of scholarly energy modern biography demands it would be rational to redistribute some of it ...”

“... The American press is waging a campaign against American universities, assisted by a barrage of muckraking books. It would be naive or dishonest to claim that there are no follies or crying abuses in the country’s higher education. Few institutions can have given their enemies more ammunition than American universities have over the last few years ...”

“... I don’t handle divorce business.’ In general, scholarly investigators should follow Philip Marlowe’s rule. One feels degraded when Dickens’s private letters are subjected to infra-red photographic analysis (as they were in the 1950s). Beneath the crossings-out are references to Ellen Ternan, his mistress – or perhaps not his mistress. It is only by chance that any incriminating letters survive: Dickens’s son Henry and Ellen Ternan’s son Geoffrey Robinson destroyed all such correspondence ...”

“... Future historians looking back at the Rodney King insurrection in South Central Los Angeles will not see (or not just see) another in the line of racial explosions which go back through Watts, the Zoot Suit riots, to the ‘Yellow Peril’ pogroms of the early 20th century. What distinguishes this particular affray by (and against) a Californian ethnic minority is that it was the first such to be entirely and comprehensively covered by television ...”