“... endorse this: ‘The books here on my shelves have countless examples of similar behaviour.’When Michael Ryan murdered 14 people in Hungerford in 1987 (and then killed himself), the idea was put about that he’d been motivated by watching Rambo videos. That someone could, apparently without motive, massacre strangers on the streets of a Berkshire town was ...”

“... was the final episode of the fifth season of Dynasty, when Amanda Carrington’s wedding to Prince Michael of Moldavia is interrupted by a gang of Balkan rebels bursting into the royal chapel and shooting everyone down with machine-guns. The vaporous metaphorical role played by music in Bel Canto is taken in Patchett’s new novel, State of Wonder, by medical ...”

“... Moore’s birthday was marked by an RAF flypast. He sang ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ with Michael Ball and it went to number one. The queen knighted him in July. In December he won a BBC Sports Personality of the Year award and British Airways flew him to Barbados for a holiday. Trains, buses, police dogs, horses and a fireboat were named after ...”

“... come to suppose that everything can be done by Notes. When I was a student I appeared in a play by Michael Codron, directed by his friend, Adrian Brown: just before we went on, Codron appeared to give us a Note. ‘Adrian is making this too heavy and Germanic,’ he said. ‘I want it to be light, French, a soufflé.’ This confused us performers and wrecked ...”

“... predictably on the Establishment snobbery personified by the prosecuting counsel, Mervyn Griffith-Jones. No one, as Inglis says, can resist quoting his rhetorical question to the jurors: was Lawrence’s novel the sort of thing they would wish their wives or servants to read? But the routine satirising of Griffith-...”

“... the narrator has been called in to replace, was the former prime minister’s press secretary. Michael McAra is in pretty much every way the opposite of Alastair Campbell, for all that they both have Scottish names. For a start, McAra is dead. He apparently fell off the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard in the middle of January, having had a few drinks in the ...”

“... Buchi Emecheta’s novel is dedicated to her 1981 students at the University of Calabar. Double Yoke is a tale of student life at that university and evidently the teacher has learned a great deal from her pupils, pulling out passages from their essays and exercises to make her own point about their lives and ideas. This is not an English-style comedy of university life, like Chukwuemeka Ike’s Toads for Supper: it belongs to another genre of Nigerian fiction – the self-confidently didactic style of S ...”

“... of linguists in the 20th century, led by Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield in America, Daniel Jones in Britain, and Roman Jakobson and Prince Nikolai Troubetzkoy on the Continent. Saussure’s most important breakthrough, the one that later allowed a vigorous structuralism to flourish, was the notion that all semiotic systems – human languages above all ...”

“... Everyone​knows that Mervyn Griffith-Jones QC asked an Old Bailey jury in 1960 whether Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a book they would want their wives or servants to read. The jury – which included three women – is said to have laughed. Its acquittal of Penguin on a charge of violating the newly minted Obscene Publications Act 1959 is widely regarded as a turning point in the centuries-long persecution of literature and philosophy in the name of morality ...”

“... reads like the cast-list of some bizarre Antipodean soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious an advocate of anti-German ...”

“... as film clips and graphic novels, among the rare books and manuscripts. A scene excerpted from Michael Wood’s BBC documentary In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great (1998) shows an Iranian storyteller performing, before a rapt audience, Alexander’s legendary killing of Darius III, the last of the Achaemenid Persian kings. The scene makes Alexander ...”

“... become obvious that the Tories were going to lose the election? Was it that golden moment when Michael Portillo, that scourge of unnecessary public spending, announced that £60m of public money was earmarked for a new yacht for the richest woman on earth – even though Her Majesty had made it plain she did not want one? Was it this deranged belief in the ...”

“... is doomed. Whatever else the novel does, it doesn’t show the lesbian life as recommendable. Michael Baker has taken on the task of relating The Well to John’s own life. ‘It is arguable,’ he writes, ‘that had John drawn more on her own personal knowledge, a better novel would have resulted.’ But she would have had, of course, to romanticise ...”

“... its humour less absorbing than before. Even that blend of the banal and the appalling, to which Michael Holroyd rightly drew attention, was not as compulsive as it had been. The past was claiming its own. Disillusion is in a sense completed by this biography: not, I hasten to say, the biographer’s fault, since he has made it as readable as Hamilton’s ...”

“... failed all his O-levels except art because he was too busy playing his sax. Born plain old David Jones in Brixton in January 1947, he grew up in Bromley, and spent his first years of struggling would-be stardom in Beckenham. He’d been in half a dozen bands as a saxophonist, a singer and a mime artist; he’d styled himself as a Mod, a hippy and a ...”