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“... are not publishable. We keep everything, not in the expectation that it will one day end up in Barnes & Noble, but because we know from experience that it might prove useful to jog a memory, fashion a scene or recall a character. I don’t know a single writer who spends time rummaging through their boxes looking for things to burn. There is certain to be ...”

“... most remarkably, perhaps, the novels of Peter Ackroyd, D.M. Thomas, Beryl Bainbridge, Julian Barnes and Thomas Keneally, whose Schindler’s Ark was marketed in America (under a slightly different title) as non-fiction and in Britain as a novel. Writers of light fiction, too, have added to the enrichment of their work by introducing people from history ...”

“... and Lukacs. Thematically, Doctor Criminale shapes up as a kind of post-Maastricht version of Henry James’s international theme: English ingenuousness discovers corruption beneath the seductive surfaces of European civilisation. For all his postgraduate knowingness about Barthes and other purveyors of the higher froggy nonsense, Francis is revealed to be a ...”

“... a male, homosocial elite, owes much to the ethos and economy that grew up around the court of King James VI and I. By 1605-8, the likely date of Timon, the Scottish king had been on the English throne for several years, and a pattern had been established. He bought the loyalty of the nobility and the affection of handsome young men with jewels, gold vessels ...”

“... was once a model for boys who thought cowboys put decency back into the world. On 20 July 2012, James Holmes, after dyeing his hair a kind of purple, went to a midnight screening of the Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises at the Century movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado, and sprayed the crowd with bullets, killing 12 and injuring 70. He had earlier thought ...”

“... fondness for 1980s bands like The Smiths is best understood, his biographers Francis Elliott and James Hanning suggest, as a mutation of county philistinism rather than a populist affectation.* His social liberalism, when not merely the product of good manners, seems to be a recent acquisition, while his mind-broadening PR job at Carlton TV was, Elliott and ...”

“... lunches Hitchens used to attend, along with people like Amis, Craig Raine, Mark Boxer, Julian Barnes and others. This seems mainly to have consisted of replacing regular words with slightly or much ruder ones: house becomes ‘sock’ (as it does in Amis’s genuinely funny novel Money), man becomes ‘cunt’ or ‘prong’. So you get A Cunt for All ...”

“... It is a big picture, a little under five foot by eight. Because it finished up in the Barnes Collection, whose conditions forbade colour reproduction even as late as 1992, seen now in colour it has the kick of a work newly revealed: it tests your reactions. Indeed, it’s hard not to be embarrassed by it, not to share (shamefacedly, of ...”

“... to do, and where could they go from here? ‘Supervisors at the IRS’s regional complex in Lake James township are trying to determine why no one noticed that one of their employees had been sitting dead at his desk for four days before anyone asked if he was feeling all right.’ Perhaps Wallace was writing toward paradise, where the forms are also ...”