“... and unroll one in a smarmy, bourgeois, sugar-dazed languor.It was a heroin Christmas because I was reading the greatest book I’ve ever read: the jazz musician Art Pepper’s 1979 autobiography Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper. It knocked my former top pick – Clarissa – right out of first place. As Art himself might say, my joint is getting big just ...”

“... there with them. It’s not significantly less boring in the game than it would be in real life. Peter Molyneux, a brilliant British game designer with a particular interest in ‘God games’ – games in which the player creates a world – had a great notion in a game called The Movies, which came out in 2005. In it the player designs and then runs a ...”

“... because I may be some help on Commons’). Blair also offered advice to Rupert and James Murdoch. Peter Mandelson offered to prep Brooks for an appearance before the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. Two Conservative peers gave glowing character references: Baron Black of Brentwood, a former director of the Press Complaints Commission, for ...”

“... work resonated with sympathetic policymakers. He and his associates, such as Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend, had particularly intimate connections with the Wilson governments of the 1960s, but their reach was not confined to Britain. They were consulted by more than one broadly progressive foreign government. Much of the social policy of Mauritius and ...”

“... also left him with a bee in his bonnet about comic books. His younger patients, he observed, liked reading comics, and as far as he could see the medium was a poisonous jumble of will- to-power fantasies, sexualised violence, misogyny, racism and deviant sexuality. He wasn’t the first to take aim at ‘the marijuana of the nursery’, as a columnist for the ...”

“... to notice this?’ The procedure requires a Leavisite lavishness of long quotation, and after reading the book, one has a stronger aftertaste of Trollope (now better understood) than of his exegete Stephen Wall, who remains an unfailingly helpful but unobtrusive intelligence. The key to Wall’s readings is never to force anything, always letting the ...”

“... harpy of ‘Bang bang, you’re dead’; the jobs at the Foreign Office, at the Poetry Society, at Peter Owen, that became the jobs written about in Loitering with Intent, A Far Cry From Kensington (1988) and no doubt others. But it skates over many things about which eager beavers may want to know more: Muriel Camberg’s disastrous teenage marriage to Sydney ...”

“... with ‘Berryman’, and deconstructing ‘memoirs’ as ‘me-moirs’. As long as reading the book lasts, it is unnecessary to worry abut modernism, crisis, decline and fall, apocalypse, the death of God, or of the Author. But the serious parts of the book are balanced upon sentiments I think Enright cares about – the desire to attend to the ...”

“... She wrote slowly, and, like the heroine of New Grub Street, did her time in the British Museum Reading Room, grinding articles (‘The Governess in Fiction’, ‘Mary Stuart in Fiction’) out of other people’s books. Original to the point of wilfulness when the impulse to poetry came, she seems, with these prose contributions, to have studied the ...”

“... five-year intervals. It is likely that few but devoted fans could cite them from memory. I am reading from the list at the back of Daugherty’s book: Good as Gold (1979), God Knows (1984), Picture This (1988), Closing Time (1994) and Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man (2000). Unlike Catch-22, the later books all deliver a rich dose of the flavour of ...”

“... with the expression of tightly shut concentration that very small babies wear in sleep.’ I kept reading: how could I not? All that dancing consonance! That deft alliteration! Then came a sentence to choke on, for political, not aesthetic reasons: ‘I was staying with an Oxford contemporary who had bought an estate in the West Highlands … in an idle ...”

“... a longer period if it was ‘within a defined timescale’. This, I reflect, is the best holiday reading, and it flows from the risks Trimble took in signing the Agreement. He then failed to sell it, just as he failed to modernise his party and failed to create a real sense of civil consensus, but this was due to the inadequacy of his party, starved of ...”

“... fit only for the journals of professional organisations, which were formed partly to create new reading audiences. The first specialist society was, appropriately, the Linnaean Society, founded in 1788 around Linnaeus’s remarkable botanical collection, which was purchased for £1000 by James Edward Smith in 1783 and brought to London over the protest of ...”

“... his novel set in 18th-century Naples. In Les Trois Femmes de ma vie the young Dominique listens to Peter Pears singing Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo in a booth at the HMV shop on Oxford Street, with a thrilled sense of eavesdropping on two levels of erotic complicity, not only between Michelangelo and his beloved but also between singer and ...”

“... creed of a dismal little sect. But despite his growing reputation as the abracadabra man behind Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, Sinclair doesn’t write as a believer either here or in Lud Heat (1975). Placing his own necromancy closer to the tradition of Rimbaud than to that of Madame Blavatsky, he uses myth to cut through contemporary closures: to drag Brick ...”