“... of hope is immediately undermined by a hint of violence, a naturalistic detail out of a Jack London story. The ‘stray’ could refer to a dog or a bullet. It’s a funny line, but it’s also an expression of anxiety, the thought of a person who can’t enjoy things because they’re waiting for something terrible to happen.Doom had reason to feel ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a little wrinkle in the love triangle involving Bellow, his then wife Sondra, and Sondra’s lover Jack Ludwig, also a member of the Bard English Department. Mustn’t there be, it was suggested, some ‘homosexual component’ – Atlas probably wants to say ‘homosocial’ – in the relationship between the two men? To explain this sort of arrangement, he ...”

“... the poor but beautiful young Annie’s hand in marriage. Although she already has a sweetheart, Jack, she allows herself to be persuaded by her social-climbing mother to marry. To preserve propriety, Doctor Strong’s friend, Wickfield, has Jack removed to army service in India. Annie wilts: she’s sacrificed her natural ...”

“... you to buy a decent pair of trousers? Mods posed a far less obvious threat. They flew the Union Jack, after all, and most of them had jobs; they were clean, well turned-out and had nice haircuts. In 1964 there was a brief spasm of tabloid outrage over some rather tame skirmishes between Mods and Rockers, mostly conducted in bracing seaside ozone. Talk of ...”

“... that might possibly be designated as someone else’s duty: the postwar world of I’m All Right Jack was already clear in embryo. The collision between these very different subcultures was brutal. The Canadians quickly discovered that 187 of their colleagues, taken prisoner, had been executed by the Hitler Jugend division – 30 mutilated Canadian bodies ...”

“... extra-judicial killing of animals, in particular, was frowned on. In 1576, a Franconian hangman, Jack Ketch, decided to take the law into his own hands and publicly hang a sow that was awaiting trial for an (alleged) attack on a carpenter’s child. Ketch’s actions were denounced by the authorities, and he fled the area in disgrace (it’s more likely to ...”

“... and the Treaty of 1707, Scottish Imperial ambitions had perforce to operate under the Union Jack and not the Saltire, yet in some parts of the world one would scarcely have known it. By the 1760s, Scots controlled huge swathes of what was supposedly the English East India Company’s patronage. The first Scottish Prime Minister, Lord Bute, allowed his ...”

“... shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jack-fruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun. There’s heat but no dust in this opening paragraph, and though it’s an odd word to use, what’s ...”

“... clients he tended to become aggressive and uncooperative. The users of the buildings paid the price. From the moment the spotlight fell on him, Stirling adopted an unchanging style of dress – blue or green shirt, baggy sweater, purple socks, acid green briefcase – revved up his buccaneering manner and collected a circle of acolytes. Beware the student ...”

“... all the important US novelists writing at the turn of the century can be contained within it: Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin. McElrath and Crisler, however, claim that the naturalist novel has been slighted by scholars in favour of the realist. This was true when they began writing their ...”

“... essays on the Post-Modern, some of which have appeared in earlier books by Jameson, and it pays a price for thematic unity by omitting some of the best things he has written in recent years, among them his appreciations of the architectural writings of Manfredo Tafuri and the novels of Philip K. Dick. Still, these essays show him to be, unlike Lyotard, only a ...”

“... Higher Education and Literary Supplements; we know about HarperCollins, and hence about Jack Higgins, and about Fourth Estate, and hence about The Corrections; we know about the BSkyB network in Britain, about its role in pioneering multi-channel TV, and about its ownership of the rights to transmit Premier League football, which have just been ...”