“... The lives of people in rural or suburban areas – Glover lived in Shelby, a small town 45 miles from Charlotte – were dramatically affected by the internet, whose potential to connect everyone, wherever they were, to everyone else, reconfigured the relationship between the centre and the periphery. Glover’s distribution network, suddenly, was ...”

“... and presumably left the country, disappearing from the record until he resurfaced five thousand miles to the east, at Port Arthur, in 1901. He got a job with a firm that supplied the Russian navy, while also (possibly, probably) keeping an eye on the tsar’s Pacific fleet for his spymasters in London. Margaret went with him but after a few months she ...”

“... street preacher called Brother Walter. Eno had also been listening to gospel, dub, Fela Kuti, Miles Davis. In a canny Arena documentary from 2010, Eno digitally recreates Donna Summer’s ‘State of Independence’, replacing its beautiful chorale backing with a multi-tracked choir of himself and erasing every last drop of awe and surrender in the ...”

“... the movement of the great armies was signalled by an immense smell of sweat preceding them for miles and miles. There is here certainly from time to time the disgust with same-sex physicality, but not the nausea of the male other to be found in Bloom’s exposure to a crowded pub at lunchtime (‘Men. Men. Men.’) or ...”

“... oil as a foodstuff was its use as a coating to stop the tin used for canned food oxidising. As Jonathan Robins notes in Oil Palm: A Global History, ‘few people in the industrialised world ate much palm oil until the 1920s.’ In the United States, it wasn’t officially recognised as a food until 1930 (dairy farmers had fought hard against the new ...”

“... that she and her handlers have been fashioning since the debacle of the 2008 primaries, or so Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes argue in HRC, their inside-dopester account of Clinton’s ‘rebirth’. Allen and Parnes serve as a chorus, commenting portentously on the events described in Hard Choices. Together the two books constitute a vast vanilla pudding ...”

“... of these genres had defeated everyone except very rare, much more experienced talents such as Miles Davis and Captain Beefheart, but the Pop Group were undeterred: not only did they plan to create a new music, they planned to use it to carry the most challenging political lyrics. The music press, which was going through a highbrow phase almost ...”

“... poetry allots him more entries than it does Owen, Graves, Sassoon or Edward Thomas, and by Jonathan Barker, whose 1985 edition of the Selected Poems reprints more than a third of his 800 or so poems. But it was Larkin who made the best case for him, when he included five of Davies’s poems in the Oxford Book of 20th-Century English Verse. The choices ...”

“... of all single parents. Once, in the car with her, ‘she sped up to what seemed like a hundred miles per hour and told me that she was going to crash the car and kill us both.’ She lost a nursing job after she rollerbladed through the hospital emergency room, high on painkillers. Vance likes to connect his mother’s drug problem to US immigration ...”

“... but there were other children in the block with whom I played in the spaces of the flats. Helen, Jonathan, Susan, whose doors I knocked on, with whom I would have tea sometimes, who, occasionally, would have tea with me in my flat. So, I still dream about getting back to roam in the corridors, to climb the fire escape, to play the games and tell myself the ...”

“... longue while Frost typed. There was something glossy and irreal about Twin Peaks, the town ‘five miles south of the Canadian border, twelve miles west of the state line’, where a high schooler could look like Elizabeth Taylor in saddle shoes and MacLachlan, as Special Agent Dale Cooper, had the same quality Kael detected ...”

“... echo of this imperfectly acknowledged transformation in the more avowedly Marxist work of Jonathan Dollimore. In his absorbing book Radical Tragedy Dollimore made free use of the term ‘essentialism’, meaning the ascription of a permanent, necessary form to reality. He wrote, in a way which still seems bizarre to me, as if Karl Popper had never ...”

“... a ‘pre-emptive strike’ against North Korea’s nuclear reactors at Yongbyon, about sixty miles north of Pyongyang. Then, at the last minute, Jimmy Carter got North Korea to agree to a complete freeze on activity at the Yongbyon complex, and a Framework Agreement was signed in October 1994. The Republican Right railed against this for the next six ...”

“... Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third World. Enough of ill-disciplined prose and rootless lives. Enough of ...”

“... his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn the air miles – enough presumably to last him till the end of his days. Such lacing of extravagance with prudence has since become so common that Christie’s have now suspended credit card payments altogether.6 January, Yorkshire. Ring Mr Redhead, the coal-merchant at ...”