“... Strane with her therapist; she trusts that nobody else will understand. ‘It wasn’t about how young I was, not for him,’ she explains in a summary introduction that primes the reader for a lengthy statement of denial.Above everything else, he loved my mind. He said I had genius-level emotional intelligence and that I wrote like a prodigy, that he could ...”

“... this isn’t the sort of thing it’s worth worrying about in a thriller; I once read a novel by Robert Ludlum in which the hero gives his London cab driver a £100 note. Anyway, ‘a group of pro-Ukraine, anti-Russia separatists assaulted a ranch in northern Algeria where Suliman Cindoruk was believed to be hiding’ – huh? just roll with it – but they ...”

“... his grandmother, but not to any of his siblings, displaced as they were around the plantation.As a young boy he was stoical and resourceful. He had a habit of singing outside the window of Lucretia Auld, his owner’s daughter – a ploy she ‘very soon came to understand as a petition for a piece of bread’. He was exposed to countless acts of brutality: a ...”

“... It is lifted out, suspended, musing, as in ‘A Morning in Vicenza’: The sun was so fragile, so young, that we were a little scared; a careless move might scratch it, just a shout – if anyone had tried – might do it harm; only the rushing swifts, with wings hard as cast-iron, were free to sing out loud, because they’d spent their brief, uneasy ...”

“... of the early 1990s. Over the Barlow Clowes fiasco, the Government, represented by Ernst and Young, sued Touche Ross; over BCCI, Touche Ross sued Ernst and Young and Price Waterhouse. Over Atlantic Computers, Price Waterhouse sued Touche Ross. Over Wallace Smith, KPMG sued Coopers and Lybrand. Over London United ...”

“... endured by a child dying of tuberculous meningitis or paralysed by spinal disease, the notion of a young life being extinguished after a slow decline was once the inspiration of many novels and much poetry. In The White Plague, René and Jean Dubos remark how death from consumption, because ‘it was believed to affect chiefly sensitive natures . . . could be ...”

“... book, Final Solutions, caused a minor scandal when it was chosen to receive a small award from the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association in 1962. The national director of the YMHA asked that some possibly libellous references be removed from the manuscript; Seidel refused; the prize was revoked, the original ...”

“... of Oedipus and Electra (recall that 16-inch paternal member), the juxtaposition of the attractive young woman leered at by a faceless male multitude, then bisected by one of its number, becomes the causal chain that he needs must loop and yank through narrative after narrative. In his early novels, and in the LA Quartet to which The Black Dahlia ...”

“... ripe for resolution, often because the necessary laboratory techniques have just come on stream. Robert Koch’s choice of anthrax in 1873 is a brilliant instance of this. Thanks to anthrax, he founded bacteriology as a science and in little over a decade catapulted himself from the life of a rural doctor in a small town in Posen – a province of the Second ...”

“... but he does do a dangerous thing with his money. He leaves a lot of it, when he dies, to a young American niece. She is grateful, of course, and the money enhances her freedom – at first. It’s what she does with her freedom that darkens her world. She knows the money is not exactly to blame, but has to believe, once she has married a man who very ...”

“... III, yet he positioned himself as the voice of science and reason, above the quotidian fray.As a young man, caught up in the turmoil of 1848, Renan wrote a manifesto, ‘The Future of Science’, which gave confident expression to his hopes that disinterested inquiry would increasingly dispel superstition and confusion. But, perhaps for reasons of ...”

“... jar of brown whey and a bowlful of turnips and eels’.) In his role as host and counsellor to the young, Amis comments on his work in progress, like the narrator of London Fields, in interstitial chapters filled with writing advice and ‘what Gore Vidal used to call “book chat”’. The advice is enjoyably pontifical about such matters as the ‘sonic ...”

“... meaning. One touchstone is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), in which the camera stalks young Danny at just above ground level as he pedals his tricycle down the interminable featureless passageways of the Overlook Hotel. ‘The Shining,’ Luckhurst concludes, ‘revealed something about the emotional latency of corridors: a simple lesson in the ...”

“... what they have increasingly come to regard as an embarrassing anachronism. When the manager Robert Newman and the young Henry Wood inaugurated an eight-week season of Promenade Concerts in 1895, they were not doing anything very novel. Such ‘promenades’ had been a permanent yet ephemeral part of London cultural ...”

“... the impossible. Bear in mind that even in this group there are sharp differences in ability. As Robert X. Cringely, a (pseudonymous) commentator on the computer business who in 1991 published Accidental Empires, the first and still the best book on the growth of the industry, explains: at the extreme edge of the normal distribution, there are programmers ...”