“... its nervous system. Monomania as a shorthand method of characterisation has a long history in English fiction, but traditionally it has been used for comic minor characters with no inner life: Thwackum and Square in Tom Jones, say, or Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion. McEwan’s new novel, Solar, unlike any of his previous work, is avowedly comic. And much ...”

“... shots for the South Bank Show, ‘smiling, simpering, giggling, looking down at his nails’. Richard Harris at the Savoy in 1990, ‘playing pocket billiards’ through his tracksuit bottoms. Rafael Nadal in Rome in 2011, ‘lying on a massage table with his flies undone, affording me a good view of his Armani underpants – Armani being one of his many ...”

“... and under a braying donkey, a practice that continued well into the Tudor period. The schooling of English physicians in the Middle Ages was performed in close conjunction with the Church. Only Oxford and Cambridge had medical schools. The training took between six and nine years, involved placements in Salerno and Paris, and incorporated not just ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... makes his favourite writers sound rather like a squad of marines, or weekend hikers. Writing about Richard Eberhart in 1960, for example, he claimed that ‘Eberhart ... is a prolific writer, so the metaphysical pieces may merely be poetic callisthenics to keep him fit until his next burst of creative energy.’ Of Hugh MacDiarmid in 1962: ‘He has managed a ...”

“... man. A book, In the Wake of a Deadad, would emerge. Even silence – Paul Auster, Dinos Chapman, Richard Wentworth – would be published. ‘No reply’ becomes part of the texture, along with hesitations, prevarications, confessions. Many of the respondents turn Kötting’s challenge back on themselves: their refusal to look into the eyes of a lifeless ...”