“... reading’ of the expert, but with the hooked absorption of, say, the Dickens or the Sherlock Holmes fan. Lowell appears himself to have been an ardent Dickensian, and the best things in what is otherwise a rather stagey unfinished essay he wrote on ‘Art and Evil’ is an inspired commentary on Mrs Gamp as a detailed ‘life study’. There is certainly ...”

“... with much detail, and walk-on cameos by ascertainably ‘real’ 1990 guests – John Major, Richard Rogers, Neil Kinnock and, of course, the richly despised Howard Jacobson. Francis Jay gives an impromptu television interview in which, with all the authority of one who has studied deconstruction at Sussex, he dismisses the shortlisted candidates as ...”

“... he is unafraid to confront powerful enemies because he has nothing to lose. While Sherlock Holmes just wants to find out who did it, Father Brown is a detective with a cause, using his lightning perception of the real facts to explain to the villain that all is known, and to hear his confession before any suicide or further crime can be ...”

“... Richardson speculates that they may have discussed poetry. Both men were protégés of Norman Holmes Pearson, an instructor in the English department at Yale. Pearson was a correspondent of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens as well as F.O. Matthiessen, the Harvard scholar and cousin of his pupil, who had taken his own life earlier in 1950 under a cloud of ...”

“... me try now to apply them in the British context. Consider first the case of the Crossman Diaries. Richard Crossman kept the diaries while a member of the Cabinet, as his colleagues were aware. After his death they were edited, a first volume was prepared for publication and serialisation began in the Sunday Times. The Crown brought a civil proceeding to ...”

“... government; a spate of genealogically informed memoirs as part of a broader ethnic revival – Richard Gambino’s Blood of My Blood: The Problem of Italian Americans, for example, and Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat. Capitalism turned all this into profit, initially through print publication and the rise of professional genealogy services, and on to ...”

“... with members of the Lawrence family and Duwayne Brooks, the inability of detectives to operate HOLMES (the computerised cross-referencing system), and the failure to investigate until a month later the presence of a red Astra car at the scene of the murder. The car was found to have contained five local white youths (not the eventual suspects) who had ...”

“... in the flats above and below don’t even know there’s been a fire. This was something else.’ Richard Welsh is a senior officer with the London Fire Brigade. His pager went off at 1.18 a.m. ‘Initially they had six machines there,’ he said. ‘Then they asked for eight, and then ten, and then 15, 20, and then 25. I’m hearing that on the way there, so ...”