“... possibilities of a committed postmodern aesthetic: Brian De Palma, Neil Jordan, David Lynch, Tim Burton, Gus van Sant, Stephen Frears, the Coen Brothers, Pedro Almodóvar, Spike Lee. Even during the darkest days (in 1983 Kael referred to ‘a low, low point’), there was always something to recommend. And at the start of Hooked, a collection of pieces from ...”

“... recording of ‘God Save the King’ and other patriotic anthems. ‘Not surprisingly’, Richard Weight remarks in Patriots, the convoy ‘got a muted reception when it parked in the ruins of Berlin’. In France, the bus crews were treated to mayoral banquets, only for their leader to complain about the ‘strange dishes’ which weren’t ‘up to ...”

“... under Bellow’s powerful prose. The rhetoric of multiplicity is other than American (Robert Burton probably invented it for English prose) but both Bellow and McBain are probably hearing some rhythm from Whitman’s sometimes tedious but more often breathtaking echt American anaphoras, constructed to coast us as in a spaceship across an otherwise ...”

“... that makes you want to read him. His prose only intermittently wears Thomas Browne and Robert Burton and Thomas Fuller and Tristram Shandy on its sleeve. At other times it has a tart poeticism: ‘He is boy-rid, sick of perpetual boy.’ Or exhibits that proto-Dickensian habit of comic extension: ‘We have been dull at Worthing one Summer, duller at ...”

“... Windus archive (one of his very few manuscript sources), Inglis comes on a 1953 letter by one Kay Burton accusing Williams of plagiarism and claiming that the section on Ibsen, in his first book, rested on some Cambridge lectures by Muriel Brad-brook. Inglis quotes from Williams’s ‘cross’ denial, claims (without giving chapter or verse) that his letter ...”

“... year well into the 20th century. Part of the reason was the insanely long hours they worked. The Burton-on-Trent brewing tycoon Michael Bass, who moved half a million barrels of beer by rail each year (the ‘undercroft’ of St Pancras Station, now the departure area for Eurostar passengers, was originally built as a depot for some of this beer), became a ...”

“... From the start the dismissive though faintly technical-sounding ‘pervert’ is pervasive. ‘PC Burton said he knew Jones as a convicted pervert,’ we read in an early newspaper report – the word trenchant but fastidious, declining to engage in the niceties of just what he was convicted of. The distaste it conveys is summed up by the awful Winterton when ...”

“... under a thousand apiece from Jean-Yves Tadié and William Carter; Joyce, at 59, eight hundred from Richard Ellmann. Moving down the scale to medium or lightweights, there is little reduction in size. If we confine ourselves to Britain, Martin Stannard produced a thousand pages on Evelyn Waugh, who died when he was 62; Graham Greene, who survived him by a ...”