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“... and when one of them was recovering from an illness, she entertained him by making up the story of Jack Carstares, the glamorous son of an earl, who is exiled for supposedly cheating at cards but secretly returns to England disguised as a highwayman. She wrote it out as The Black Moth and sent it to Constable, who offered her a £100 advance. She asked the ...”

“... shapes in comic-book colours, with daring names like Volcano, Spitfire, Chrysanthemum Fountain and Jack in the Box.After an eternity of waiting, the big night arrived. We gathered at the end of the garden, Dad with a torch stomping about in his duffel coat, arranging things. The small bonfire was lit, and we gazed into the flames licking round the Guy like a ...”

“... of narrative point of view. Its centres of consciousness include Margaret’s first husband Jack – now a heart surgeon – her son Bayard, and Lourdes, her resourceful Hispanic maid. There are walk-on narratorial roles for Manny, Lourdes’s sinister son, and for the teenage wife of a Hollywood film director. Two domineering old ladies, the sole ...”

“... at Salem on 10 June 1692? A steal at just 0.3 ether, or $780. One of the founders of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, auctioned an NFT of the first ever tweet, five words – ‘just setting up my twttr’ – that cost the winner some $2.9 million. A CryptoKitty The owners of these digital artefacts have no rights to the intellectual property. Sina Estavi, who ...”

“... at the ‘British disease’, they say, crippling the country with a surfeit of I’m-all-right-Jack individualism. Why should the Japanese take that particular road to Bethlehem? Are they not Number One, in any case? Is it not possible that they have found an alternative modernity, which avoids the oppressive stagnation of Communism as well as the jittery ...”

“... horse and cart, a ladder and a telephonist’. This account is plainly a few coppers short of the price of a conference call. But Bovis indeed grew and it owed much to the driving efforts of Samuel Joseph, who capped a successful business career with a less happy term as Lord Mayor of London during the Second World War. For Keith Joseph, born in 1918 and ...”

“... without foregoing fashionable success, academic honours and large royalty cheques. The heavy price which novelists since Henry James had had to pay for being labelled as experimental artists was, it seemed, no longer being exacted. Robert Coover, born in 1932, certainly has no reason to complain of neglect. ‘America’s most outrageous novelist ...”

“... as a bona fide political platform, an early modern Critique of the Gotha Programme? The late Jack Hexter saw the book as an immanent critique of Christian humanism, a root and branch rebuke to intellectuals who thought church and society susceptible of piecemeal rather than revolutionary reform. Hythloday’s ‘dialogue of counsel’ with Cardinal ...”

“... ago McVeigh was apparently in the habit of selling The Turner Diaries (then retailing at $10) half-price at gun shows, so keen was he to proselytise. One report has it that he ripped out and sent seven pages of the book to his young sister, Jennifer, just before the bombing. What she told Jennings was that her brother gave her the whole novel to read ...”

“... belong to commuters who do not commute, or those who have escaped their roots and are paying the price for it. The Vale of Aylesbury (A Perfect Execution) and the Medway (In the Kingdom of Air) are viscerally invoked, without recourse to heritage nudges, Dickensian hints. They come over as places known and experienced, rather than merely researched and ...”

“... Five poets performed. Kenneth Rexroth, the consigliore of radicalism, was master of ceremonies. Jack Kerouac, too self-conscious to read, acted as cheerleader: ‘Go! Go! Go!’ He passed out slopping gallon jugs of Californian Burgundy. There had been poetry readings in the Bay Area before this and the Six Gallery was hardly virgin territory. The space had ...”

“... a gruesome account of a day spent with his father, the first time they had spent together since Jack became an adult. Hemingway père and fils went up on the roof of Hemingway’s work-room, armed with shotguns, in order to kill some of the local buzzards. Hemingway got his servant to bring up a pitcher of martinis: after three pitchers (and many buzzard ...”

“... to a certain B. Mellor, who apparently bought the book in Blackwells, Oxford, in October 1937, price nine shillings. All in all, my Letters from Iceland is a sturdy and well-made object of considerable literary and historical interest, which has sustained numerous readings and spillages, while remaining in excellent condition. Simon Armitage and Glyn ...”

“... go to clandestine meetings in his room in the House, where an ill-assorted group – Christopher Price, David Owen, John Mackintosh, Jack Ashley and myself – drank whisky and talked devaluation. When devaluation finally came, I hoped he would become Chancellor of the Exchequer. When he did not, I hoped – incredible as ...”

“... even walk – Louise won a healthy baby contest shortly after she was born. The girls’ father, Jack Hovick, was a not too successful newspaperman and Rose left him shortly after the birth of her daughters – after an argument about, among other things, the price of June’s ballet class. For a long time, it was assumed ...”