“... it was the year of the first double-decker bus, horse-drawn, of course, produced by Adams and Co. of Bow, London; it was also the year a Patent Mile Index was fitted to a London cab: the first taxi-meter. The Magnetic Telegraph Company, founded by Samuel Morse, was already two years old. Edison wasn’t the only American legend born in 1847; so ...”

“... his girlfriend Aubade lie around, immobilised, thinking about the Laws of Thermodynamics, Henry Adams, heat death, and the imminent decline of all energy. It is a mostly charming, sometimes tiresome showoff piece, but the way it is laid out offers, as does the apartment itself, a neat diagram of how in the novels Pynchon apportions things on a more massive ...”

“... to, and seems largely to have been created by, the tradition which has been located by Simon Adams in the field of foreign policy. There the radicals, under the successive leadership of Leicester, of Essex, of Prince Henry and of the third Earl of Pembroke, urged England towards aggressive support for international Protestantism. To note that the ...”

“... a search for a new ideology to replace the overt policy of pushing Afrikanerdom. Heribert Adams identifies the ‘idea ofsurvival’ as the essential content of official propaganda. ‘Survivalpolitics,’ he says, ‘allows the leadership to determine internal changes without laying itself open to charges of betrayal ofdoctrine ... Survival is ...”

“... car-park having a smoke. I manage to refuse his offer of a Sweet Afton, and as I do so he notices my copy of Dean Godson’s biography of David Trimble, Himself Alone, lying in the back seat with David McDuff’s new translation of The Idiot and some other holiday books. When I say I want to write about Himself Alone, he exclaims: ‘A thick brick like ...”

“... of domestic architecture doubles in her telling as an architecture of the self: ‘there was in me a secret retreat where I wished no one to intrude.’ Books offered a way out of Old New York; and by the time she published her autobiography, Wharton’s own library contained some four thousand of them, divided between her two houses in France. Yet in ...”

“... By my count, though I may have missed a few, this is the 25th volume of Ezra Pound’s highly distinctive correspondence to see the light of day. The first selection of his letters, edited by D.D. Paige and culled from the years 1907-41, was published in 1950, when Pound was four years into what would be a 12-year sojourn in St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, to which he’d been confined indefinitely after pleading insanity at his trial for treason in 1946 ...”

“... My mother taught me to read in the summer of 1945, between VE Day and VJ Day, when I was turning three. Time lay on her hands: my father, a major in the Territorials, was away in Palestine, battling Irgun and the Stern Gang in the latter days of the British Mandate, and wasn’t due to be demobilised from the army until the end of the year; and I was a pushover for her deck of home-made flash cards and a game I found more fun than our previous sessions of Animal Snap ...”

“... an attack on the establishment. Wanted to disturb them,’ he said. ‘I could just hear my father saying: "Why do you want to look at these scenes, they’re depressing. Why don’t you look at the nice things in life?”’ Then, towards the end of his life, when he was teaching photography at Yale, he encouraged his students ‘to seek to have a ...”

“... glory of the century of progress. A White Star Line poster reproduced in Michael Wilkinson and Robert Hamilton’s collection shows the great hulk of the ship, sunlit, belching smoke out of three of its four funnels – the fourth was there only for effect – and cutting a swathe between a small sailing ship and a three-masted square rigger. A sliver of ...”

“... with pairs of butlers, cooks, cleaners, sailors and security operatives.Knowles’s book acted on me like a goad, a stone in the shoe. I had the notion that somewhere behind and beyond the sharp-eyed sociological expeditions she undertakes was a General Theory of Everything. A resolution of that terrible inundation coming from all sides at once: our ultimate ...”

“... the Perth-Sydney balloon race to the smallest gumnut-throwing contest in the local Rotary park. My car’s new registration sticker bears that logo, and the words ‘Australia 1788-1988’: I’ll swear the car, an elderly German, has been particularly grumpy in her gearshift ever since it went on.I resent it myself. As a white Australian who rather likes ...”

“... territory, but with another curious turn. For this strange emotion – what Douglas Adams might have called ‘the long toothache of the soul’ – isn’t a late 20th-century Hollywood add-on, but Tolkien himself, through and through. He theorised it in his 1938 lecture ‘On Fairy-Stories’ as ‘a fleeting glimpse of Joy beyond the walls of ...”

“... people who had helped Kathy in her last years. Tattooists, bodybuilders, motorcycle girls, S/M practitioners, herbalists, it was almost like an upstairs-downstairs thing.’A few weeks after that, a smaller group attended a sea-scattering at Fort Funston, the location picked by Matias Viegener, the friend who had done most to look after the dying Acker ...”