“... rewrote,’ is the epigraph for Bidart’s introduction. I can’t imagine the blizzard of a paper-chase required of Lowell and Bidart; it was something that as a student I wasn’t willing to contemplate. If all three versions of Notebook had been incorporated, it would have put maybe another five hundred pages on the book, and probably required a second ...”

“... at Brighton. That bomb outrage will have done Forsyth’s novel no harm. Whatever else, the chase scenes of The Fourth Protocol drag the reader along at an invigorating gallop. By contrast, Vladimir Volkoff’s The Set-Up is a ponderous affair. The plots of the two novels are exactly similar: both deal with fiendishly deep-laid Soviet conspiracies to ...”

“... indeed her ‘feeling of tenderness’ for Hughes, and her ‘shame at my complicity in the chase that has made his life a torment’. On another level, the taxi driver and his silent wife and child become accusing symbols of another story.At the heart of the book, Malcolm comes face to face with Jacqueline Rose, whose critical book on Plath outraged ...”

“... A British astronaut would have stuck in a flag and said: “I name this moon Elizabeth.”’ And Michael Collins – the Apollo 11 astronaut left behind orbiting in the command module – was the first of several Apollonians who suggested eventually sending a ‘priest, poet or philosopher’: ‘From these people you might get a much better feeling of what ...”

“... Polish Meals for Everyone’. And there’s the optional thrill of a fine-yourself chase in a little red car. ‘You’ve been caught on camera – Your photo for £1.’ It’s time to leave the unbroken set with its traces of blitz and blight, workhouse and limelight, and to present myself for the screening at the London College of ...”

“... of two steel blocks each by Richard Serra (for obvious reasons neither will be moved anytime soon).Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic at the New York Times, calls the new design ‘smart, surgical, sprawling and slightly soulless’. I would take ‘slightly soulless’ over ‘aggressively spectacular’, and given the political controversies visited on ...”

“... counterpointed by those of Wayne Koestenbaum (‘Speaking in the Shadow of Aids’) and Michael Callen (‘Aids: The Linguistic Battlefield’). For example, it seemed to me at first sight exaggerated to decry, as Grover does, the term Aids victim: ‘Fear and pity are the emotions raised by the victim,’ she writes: ‘these are less than useless ...”

“... UBS wunderkind who lost £1.4 billion in 2011, and Bruno Iksil, the ‘London Whale’ at JPMorgan Chase, who in 2012 lost an amount described by his boss Jamie Dimon as ‘a tempest in a teacup’, until it turned out to be $6.2 billion. There were a number of classic features to these mishaps. The financial instruments involved were complex; they were things ...”

“... coterie of writers or journalists on the far right. In Pincher’s work the two obsessions chase each other’s tails: the alleged need to protect national security legitimates the compulsive secrecy, while the need to expose Communist infiltration legtimates attempts to pierce that secrecy. Pincher has been going round and round this mulberry bush for ...”

“... The best book I know on the relationship between sporting culture and success is Moneyball, Michael Lewis’s account of the 2002 Oakland A’s baseball team.† The argument is compellingly simple: sports teams are run like gentlemen’s clubs rather than businesses, and clubs don’t base their business decisions on facts but on codes and ...”

“... side. ‘A shadow would come over the ship as soon as you heard you were coaling,’ said George Michael Clarkson (Joiner First Class). The great enemy was dust. All doors would be sealed; small holes were filled with oakum; lifeboats were hoisted outboard; officers and men alike wore their oldest clothes and poked Vaseline up their nostrils and spread it ...”

“... the dog days of an empire that refused to ‘make action urgent and its nature clear’. In The Chase (1934), another antecedent of Dogskin newly published here, a Brechtian dramaturgy projects the blame for such loss of nerve on to the theatre audience, for If we end tonight with the apparent triumph of reaction and folly; there is an alternative ...”

“... reconsider the film Lisztomania at this point.) Liszt did not seduce Marie d’Agoult, nor did she chase him to Switzerland. (So what did happen?) He did not see Sigismond Thalberg as a rival. (Once again, the letters belie the demystification.) Princess Cristina Belgiojoso, who staged Liszt’s famous showdown with Thalberg in her salon, was not a ...”

“... old foe Laski in the chair at the London School of Economics’, but he didn’t: Michael Oakeshott did. He quotes from C.P. Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’ lecture, ascribing it to ‘the mid-1960s’, though it was delivered and published in 1959. Most bizarrely, he even mangles an extremely well-known line of Orwell’s, his tirade about ...”

“... looking for cattle. In 1928, Dame Sibyl inaugurated a land sports day: the highlight was the chase after a greased pig. Nowadays, the dog and pet show offers prizes not just for best pedigree and best cross-breed, but for the most unsocial pet, the waggiest tail, and owners’ proficiency with egg and spoon. At the Sark Sheep Races, which celebrated ...”