“... curiosity about all things fishy.On the page, Fort comes across as a bookish, daydreamy kind of guy. Fishing is by its very nature a meditation as well as an action. Unlike an American angler, Fort’s very British mind – Eton and BalIiol – doesn’t wander easily to excavations of the self but rather to ruminations about history and class. ‘I like to ...”

“... has a snort, and Goethe’s loving it, the old bugger ... I used to work alongside a guy on the roads, Kolya his name was. He did exactly the same. He didn’t drink either ... But he practically forced us to drink instead. He’d pour for us, belch for us, get happy, the shit, and wander around in a daze.Yerofeev chooses Goethe, the epitome for ...”

“... a cause célèbre: he was finally acquitted only in 1981. And Feltrinelli refused to play the fall-guy. On the night of the bomb, he visited one of the leaders of the partisans, Cino Moscatelli, in Tuscany; and on hearing of the massacre he went into hiding. His analysis of the massacre was confirmed by the Italian courts last July, 32 years and eight trials ...”

“... the 1930s. No doubt he was moved by the hunger marches, certainly he was stirred by the death of John Cornford, appalled by Fascism, and disturbed by the plight of Jewish scholars, but what remains clear from her account is that Blunt took little serious interest in politics and had very little knowledge of, or exposure to, the unemployed or oppressed – or ...”

“... Whitehead is black and comparisons were made to Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed. John Updike has called him ‘blithely gifted’, ‘the young African-American writer to watch’. Whitehead’s new novel, John Henry Days, is longer and more ambitious than The Intuitionist, and the suggestion in its title ...”

“... In A Good Place to Die, they describe the state of mind of its narrator, a young Englishman named John Pitt, as he stares into an antique photograph, straining to make out words contained in a frame depicted within it. ‘I am drawn into that silver frame within a frame,’ John reports, ‘am cast back and forth between ...”

“... and the latest drug culture. It was to cocaine (the snuffed, not the smoked variety) what John Barleycorn was to booze, what Naked Lunch was to heroin and what Dog Soldiers was to hallucinogens. Anyone who read Bright Lights, Big City could feel an expert on the modish drug of choice, even if he had never put anything stronger than Friar’s Balsam up ...”

“... Hone had also just written and published three parodies of the Book of Common Prayer: The Late John Wilkes’s Catechism of a Ministerial Member, The Political Litany and The Sinecurists’ Creed, which satirised the venality of Tory MPs willing to say, vote for and even believe whatever their ministers told them to in exchange for the sinecures and ...”

“... in front of them, whose details appear to match an entry on a terrorist watchlist, is the bad guy he looks like. Last year the TSC processed 55,000 requests arising from what the agencies call ‘encounters’ with suspected terrorists: 150 a day, or one every ten minutes. It’s a busy place. But only, really, because a person’s identity is such an ...”

“... off Bonnie and Clyde – went to see him in The Indian Wants the Bronx in which he appeared with John Cazale, who would play Fredo in The Godfather. The first performances of The Indian Wants the Bronx were in a venue so tiny that the audience had to walk across the stage to reach the exit. But then it moved to a venue off Broadway, which is where Dunaway ...”

“... material of the book could just as well have formed the basis of a very different sort of work. John Betjeman picked up on this odd and wholly characteristic ambivalence when he wrote to congratulate him: ‘When I read the book it seemed to me so rockingly funny that nothing else would seem funny again.’Decline and Fall is one of a number of Waugh’s ...”

“... he said. ‘He came up to Grace and me and started saying that Wotan is really a misunderstood guy, having to put up with all those wailing women all the time.’ I asked Silvers where he wanted to be dropped off and he told me the office. ‘But it’s one a.m.,’ I said. ‘No rest for the wicked. Isn’t that what you say?’ He was 82 at the ...”

“... the pope can cure me,’ he says, not entirely joking. The pope, it turns out, is a Bowel Guy. In 2021, he had a hemicolectomy – the same surgery Jason had last August after a caecal flop. Two weeks ago, he was hospitalised with complications. There is some question over whether he’ll even be able to meet us, but apparently the way to get the pope ...”

“... unfortunates’. These unfortunates include not just Jerry but various friends – Haydar, Ranjit, John Wong – who share his dismay at ‘this fucking place’. Like Jerry, Ranjit – whose family fled the subcontinent to escape British imperialism – has had enough of starvation wages and petty discrimination: he’s saving up to return to India. In ...”

“... My story​ will be that John Harvard gave it to me. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked, pointing at a bronze bust in the reading room where I had arrived to give my lecture, and was told that it was the university’s founder, John Harvard. ‘Damn,’ I said. ‘It never even occurred to me that Harvard was a guy ...”