“... criminal commits the perfect crime for its beauty, for the perfection of the puzzle. Classic English detective fiction suffered for its neatness. It was implausible, frustrating, dull. (Or even nightmarishly addictive, which is my problem even with Chesterton: a much more dangerous thing.) The person usually credited with finding a way out is Dashiell ...”

“... How​ will we know when the world is ending? According to ‘The Pricke of Conscience’, an English poem c.1340, the apocalypse will proceed with a fortnight of terrifying signs. On the first day the sea will rise to the height of a mountain, then on the second day drain away to a trickle. There will be a hideous roaring from the ‘mast wonderful fisshes of the se’, blood gushing out of trees, men emerging from caves and raving incoherently, and then all the stars of heaven will cascade to the ground ...”

“... Something has happened to ‘making’, though, since E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Thompson’s title tells us that his subject is a discrete historical process, class-making. In the book, he’ll specify the large forces at work in that making – class struggle, state power, political economy, sheer greed – but ...”

“... 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 unparaphrasable vista of human data in ...”

“... beard care and curated playlists. As with the Beatles album sleeves designed by Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, this was where art and pop first locked eyes, before deciding to move in together.Ahalf-century​ on from the band’s messy divorce, you don’t have to go searching for Beatles bumpf: it’s everywhere. They’re as much a part of the public ...”

“... Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim Morrison and Robert Penn Warren are alive. Richard Nixon is dead; and a Soviet-bloc skier named Ivana Trump – someone overhears Sixties psychic Jeanne Dixon saying – will assign her name to a novel she does not write with the full and worldwide backing of one of America’s largest publishing ...”

“... of the medical expert. Northrop Frye saw the Anatomy as ‘the greatest Menippean satire in English before Swift’. If this were true, Burton would be easy to place and our special problem of style would disappear forthwith. Burton, a sort of cross between Hamlet and a pedagogic Pantaloon, certainly assumes an antic disposition, strutting and posturing ...”

“... Also, the music making, instead of being schmaltzy and to be taken critically, had become hearty English party singing, and sweet, well-loved waltzes. This afternoon Max put the company through five hours of hair-splitting Notes; and there was smouldering anger about the place, the result of many days of unrest. The preview tonight was both better and ...”

“... Three: one of the differences between Ireland and England is that in Ireland ‘the conventions of English Romanticism, its blessings in the gentle woods, its brooks that murmur and its winds that cry, were simply implausible.’ Irish landscape is determined rather by individual acts of will, violent and transient. Hence ‘ruined castles, ruined ...”

“... is not, it emerges, his seamy career in espionage, but the relationship with his own father Richard (‘Rick’), who has just died. In addition to his employer’s top secrets, Magnus has another box with him. This is his father’s old green filing-cabinet, which at last he has prised open. Rick Pym was, like Cornwell’s father, a confidence man ...”

“... Thoroughly Arnoldian, the Academy set about eradicating the ‘taint of the provincial’ from English culture, and looked forward to the salvation of the nation by ‘disinterested’ intellect. The paper foundered on the low-mindedness of its publisher (Murray), who wanted more advertisements. The editor, Charles Appleton, took the path of noble ...”

“... in the printing trade. The bulk of the forgeries were manufactured by the eminently respectable Richard Clay and Sons. The firm cannot, over a period of twenty years, have turned out a hundred or so piracies and ‘creative forgeries’ without someone noticing that their work was circulating in the second-hand market under false colours and at hugely ...”

“... York during World War Two. Among his own contemporaries (aside from two pieces, dropped from the English edition, on his friends Philippe Sollers and Jean-Paul Enthoven), Lévy only engages in discussions of the political philosopher Luc Ferry and with Régis Debray, and perhaps because he suspects that this is too lowkey, he ends the book with a nostalgic ...”

“... minds’ – defined here as Irish Catholic – the ‘essentially Protestant character’ of English rule in Ireland. Then he claims that Daniel O’Connell’s ill-defined pledge in the 1830s to repeal the parliamentary Union of 1801 which created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland ‘would, ultimately, lead to partition’.Townshend ...”

“... the correct form for telling him my age. Instead of asking it, however, he laughed and said in English: ‘No, you are not from London. You are from Pakistan.’ I informed him haughtily that I was British, born and bred. ‘No, no. How can you be from London when you dress like a Pakistani?’ ‘Look at my passport – you’ll see it’s one from ...”