“... not started the action. I can’t believe I have committed suicide since nothing has happened. No big bang or cut wrists. 65 was long enough for me. It wasn’t a complete failure I did some [at this point the words lapse into illegibility and stop]. The five-stages idea soon migrated from the dying to the bereaved, and further afield again, as ...”

“... Prods have been brainwashed into believing that they were strictly a British Community, have no Irish or Ulster traditions and therefore didn’t need to learn Irish dancing, Gaelic or folk music.’ Thus Andy Tyrie, the leader of the UDA. Tyrie supports this view with a historical argument according to which there was an ancient British people ...”

“... is, in Packer’s words, ‘the most influential writer in America today’ – an elevation that no writer of colour could previously have achieved. Toni Morrison claims he has filled ‘the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died’. Philip Roth has been led to histories of American racism by Coates’s books. David Brooks credits him for ...”

“... to Research a Job, a combined manifesto and manual published in 1978, based on the premise that no history has been more hidden or distorted than that of modern business. Shareholders and directors enjoy history in the form of capital, but aren’t in the least curious about the past itself. Researching the Swedish cement industry, for which his grandfather ...”

“... You know you’re getting old when sleeping with a vampire no longer gives you a sickly thrill. At the age of ten or eleven, having absorbed the requisite number of creaky old Bela Lugosi films, I evolved such a baleful Dracula-fear that I began sleeping every night with one arm slung backwards over my neck. This neurotic and slightly awkward posture – still habitual, I’m embarrassed to say – was meant to be prophylactic: even while snoozing, I figured, I’d be ready to fend off any emissaries from the undead who tried to bite me ...”

“... Seeing cars​ with no human inside move through San Francisco’s streets is eerie enough as a pedestrian, but when I’m on my bicycle I often find myself riding alongside them, and from that vantage point you catch the ghostly spectacle of a steering wheel turning without a hand. Since August, driverless cars have been available as taxis hailed through apps but I more often see empty cars than ones with backseat passengers ...”

“... curator of the museum – the ‘Wonder House’. The curator is a tribute to Kipling’s father, John Lockwood Kipling, who moved to Bombay as curator of the J.J. School of Art in 1865, the year of Kipling’s birth. But through the figure of the curator, Kipling also indirectly acknowledges the existence of a colonial India of intellectual collaboration ...”

“... building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John. The Hole is a statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and shovel, turn and turn about: four days to complete a grave shaft, without any of the tortured grinding and ...”

“... in the play of a great free-wheeling exercised intelligence (‘I will walke heere in the Hall ... ’tis the breathing time of day with me’) makes the work what it is, the world’s most sheerly entertaining tragedy, the cleverest, perhaps even the funniest. Dr Johnson meant this when he gave it ‘the praise of variety’, adding: ‘The pretended ...”

“... them as twenty years ought to make). She may have made Gaskell up altogether. The parsonage hall is accurately rendered; perhaps Hassall took it from life.It’s not a particularly remarkable image, just the sort one comes across by accident, one of the many that illustrated the Brontës’ novels and books about them, as well as romances of famous ...”

“... at the age of 30 has a 20 per cent likelihood of marriage, at 35 a 5 per cent chance, and at 40 no more than a 1.3 per cent chance.’ The ‘study’ was an immediate hit. It was discussed in newspapers, on television news and talk shows, and in movies, magazines, advertisements and greeting cards. The message was clear. Educated women were to feel ...”

“... construction. The second section of Part I, recounting a visit by the young Wyatt to Paris, serves no structural function – it’s also turgid, but that’s the weather of the book. Much of The Recognitions is set in New York, where Wyatt arrives after reading for the ministry and realising that his vocation is as a painter. In childhood he acquired the idea ...”

“... meningitis in 1878 aged 17, with Edward and Minnie at his bedside. ‘I never, his mother never, no master ever found any falsehood in his life,’ Edward stated in a private memorial written soon afterwards. The loss staggered him: ‘It has changed all my views of God’s work as it is to be done both in this world and the next.’ Eleven years later he ...”

“... Road to work in the Cambridge Reference Library, a dark Victorian building behind the Town Hall (gaslit in memory, though it surely can’t have been), where George III was about to make his second entrance. Sometime that autumn I bought, at Deighton Bell in Trinity Street, a copy of George III and the Politicians by Richard Pares, a book I have ...”

“... when he complained of the ‘dismal work’ of destroying papers that were of ‘absolutely no use for any purpose God or man’s’. Such remarks must sound particularly dismal to Hardy’s modern editors and biographers. They could certainly find a use for his papers. Hardy’s marvellous late harvest of lyric poetry is riddled with ghosts like those ...”