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“... reading (a rule that holds true across genres, whether it’s Harry Potter, Fifty Shades of Grey, Jack Reacher or Sally Rooney). There are layers on layers of familiarity, in other words, in both text and paratext, for readers to sink into that keep them coming back for more.Each of the later books in the series has another layer of familiarity, of ...”

“... systems. Slap on a pair of dermatrodes, punch the keys on your cyberspace deck, and you ‘jack in’, propelling your disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination of the matrix. The fastest kids on the virtual block are the console cowboys, ‘casing mankind’s extended electronic nervous system, rustling data and credit’, and always ...”

“... abhorrent to the speaker. Lord Eccles, who had the misfortune to assume Jenny Lee’s job, and Andrew Neil, an uncongenial newspaper editor, are also quite cheerfully attacked for what they did or do in their offices. Others are disliked on perhaps less explicable grounds. I was surprised to come upon a sustained and in my view immoderate onslaught on the ...”

“... a colleague at Aberystwyth who is also Plaid Cymru’s spokesman on energy. ‘I’m on it with Jack McConnell,’ I said. ‘Who’s McConnell?’ ‘Scottish First Minister.’ ‘Well, I never . . .’ This was a benign version of the Jowett syndrome but serious enough: Westminster, Holyrood and Cardiff have become places apart. As the days tick away ...”

“... young to be involved in anything like that,’ he said in court. Others remanded on bail included Jack Dabbs, a former producer of the radio programme Worldwide Family Favourites, Len Tucker, a theatrical agent, and several record promoters. At the time of the trial arrest warrants were out for members of the New World pop group who had won TV’s Opportunity ...”

“... morning: “Get up and get the stink blown off ye.”’ In the National Gallery we looked at some Jack Yeats paintings and then went to the shop, where I pointed to a line of postcards featuring Seamus. He tutted. I took one down, a portrait painted by Edward McGuire in 1974. It showed a sullen, tousle-haired graduate of the bog. Karl immediately plucked a ...”

“... I will attempt to overcome, tends towards the more cynical view ascribed to William Burroughs by Jack Kerouac. ‘When you start separating the people from their rivers what have you got? Bureaucracy!’ Having triumphantly ghosted London’s autobiography, Ackroyd’s obvious follow-up was the Thames: generator of life, origin of the city, a passage between ...”

“... biographer, does emphasise that there is no documentary proof of the link, and both he and Andrew Lycett in his Life of Conan Doyle agree that this was ‘a brave act of solidarity on Willie’s part’. That’s an understatement. It was on the day of Oscar Hornung’s birth, 24 March 1895, that Frank Harris met Wilde at the Café Royal and advised ...”

“... Dale has, I think, successfully followed in the footsteps of other Nihonjinron-bashers such as Roy Andrew Miller, the author of Japan’s Modern Myth (1982), in proving that the Japanese are not as unique as they think. This, in itself, would not be proving very much. What else does Dale have to say? Two things, it seems. First, that the Nihonjinron theorists ...”

“... an unpaid stripling in attendance on Sir Theophilus Shepstone, Haggard had helped to run the Union Jack up the flagpole in the Transvaal, to see how many Boers would salute it. Not enough, was the answer. This cordial annexation, conducted with sherry and champagne rather than firearms, led to the first Boer War and the retrocession of the Transvaal. The Royal ...”

“... church on Indian soil. He converted the Chera king of the region and baptised him with the name Andrew. (This could make sense of the otherwise mysterious ‘Andrapolis’, which the Greek version of Acts names as Thomas’s port of arrival in India: ‘Andrapolis’, or City of Andrew, may reflect the Greek author’s ...”

“... Mail test’. (The same metric was adopted by the civil servants making funding decisions in Andrew Mitchell’s now defunct Department for International Development.) Serco was fined £19.2 million last year by the Serious Fraud Office for misconduct in its electronic tagging service for the Ministry of Justice. The wrongdoing is said to have included ...”

“... London buses made a promotional tour of the Continent. The lead bus, which sported a giant Union Jack, broadcast a continuous 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 ...”

“... to think there might be more effective, if well-tried, means of trying to regard the world afresh. Jack Flea’s Birthday Celebration was written in 1974, shortly after I had finished writing the last of the stories that were to make up my first collection, First Love, Last Rites, and I think of this play as really belonging in that volume. It was commissioned ...”

“... seems to have been a meeting with George Saintsbury in Bath. According to Kipling’s biographer Andrew Lycett, the pair discussed the ‘sense of fellowship felt by people who had shared a powerful joint experience – whether fighting in war, or membership of a Mason’s lodge, even familiarity with the works of an author such as Austen’. Kipling decided ...”