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“... on his promise. Breivik was hard at work on 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, a 1518-page screed exposing the Muslim plot to conquer Christendom. In large part a compendium of extracts from counter-jihadist websites, 2083 was posted online on the day of the attacks under the name ‘Andrew Berwick’, one of Breivik’s several aliases. The signs ...”

“... of crime and the dustbins of showbiz. It’s this (and the look of so many quotations on the page) that makes his work initially inviting and accessible to a general reader like me. He writes with grace and wit and raises the odd eyebrow at those in his profession who don’t, though he can’t be too censorious of jargon, having invented a lot ...”

“... the enemy, cull ’em’ – was hailed by Martin Amis as a ‘great sayer of the unsayable’. Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within (2006) was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award, prompting one judge, Eliot Weinberger, to denounce Bawer for engaging in ‘racism as criticism’. Worried ...”

“... Gilbert’s cousin, whose views made GKC seem philosemitic, reminded him that he read the page proofs of every issue and if he was out of London would check them over the phone. Phrases in the Blackshirt such as ‘the oily, material, swaggering Jew’ and the ‘pot-bellied, sneering, money-mad Jew’ would have been specifically approved by ...”

“... culture of the 1950s and early 1960s: Ernie Kovacs, The Twilight Zone, the British Invasion, Lenny Bruce, the Beat writers, film noir. I tended to identify with my parents’ taste in things, and with the tastes of my parents’ friends, more than with the cultural tokens of my own generation. With Luke, I went to see a Ralph Bakshi film called Heavy ...”

“... is also normal within a global tradition of storytelling that’s much larger than realism,’ Bruce Robbins has argued. ‘Narrative as such poses the broader question of what circle of readers can recognise themselves at any given moment as a political collectivity or community of fate, whether in any given narrative enough guests have been ...”

“... the end of her photo session with Annie Leibovitz, Jenner looked at the gold medal she had won as Bruce Jenner in the 1976 Olympic decathlon, and commented as ‘her eyes rimmed red and her voice grew soft’: ‘That was a good day. But the last couple of days were better.’ It’s as if – even allowing for the additional pathos injected by Buzz ...”

“... places. Throughout the trilogy, Lindqvist writes in short numbered passages, mostly less than a page long. Ask him about this, and he will mention various influences: Nietzsche; British Parliamentary reports of the kind that once ruled the world with their numbered paragraphs; role-playing games which give participants short specific descriptions of the ...”

“... to exercise a sortes Hitlerianae by opening at random a copy of Mein Kampf: ‘There isn’t a page that isn’t well-written.’ As chance would have it, the copy fell open at a shriek against the Jews. At other times he laid claim to Jewish blood – tempering the true-blue Boston Brahmin birthright which conferred, as he sometimes felt, the first-class ...”

“... authorised biography of Cash, Steve Turner establishes a suitably saintly tone on the first page. ‘It was doubtful,’ he writes of his subject, ‘whether he had a bodily organ that hadn’t been operated on, an area of skin that hadn’t been gashed, or a significant bone that hadn’t been cracked.’ This sounds like an entry from Foxe’s Book of ...”

“... on the DVD versions of his own films. He’s a provocative, erudite interviewee, live and on the page. The image on the front cover of the most substantial collection, Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, edited by Paul Cronin, somehow contrives (it’s not Photoshopped) to pair an implacable-looking Herzog with a grizzly bear standing on its hind ...”

“... in the folk mythology that’s been exploited, in America, at one level by comedians like Lenny Bruce and Jackie Mason, and at quite another level, by Jewish novelists. American fiction’s most single-minded portrait of the goy is in The Assistant by Bernard Malamud. The goy is Frank Alpine, the down-and-out thief who robs the failing grocery store of the ...”

“... biography of Hardwick, has the opportunity to set this right, to begin at the beginning.Elizabeth Bruce Hardwick was born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1916, the eighth of eleven children. Her siblings became teachers, post-office clerks, beauticians, farmers, but Hardwick had larger aspirations. ‘How can you be from here and think like you do?’ a fellow ...”

“... trial attracted much attention at the time, and when Helen Selwyn was sentenced it made the front page of some British newspapers. But the case was soon forgotten, unlike the more lurid pieces of white mischief which went on in the so-called Happy Valley. Yet the Selwyn affair mattered more, and like George Orwell’s Burmese Days (published in the same ...”

“... I interrupted to say: ‘That’s Stanisław Lem’s translator!’3 The science fiction page in the HBJ catalogue featuring my book had only two other authors on it: Lem and Calvino. Kandel told me stories of Lem zipping around Vienna in his lemon yellow sports car. Heaven.Once I was on my way, I unashamedly plundered a hallucinatory set-piece from ...”