“... didn’t mention that. So the stylised definite article has been dropped, and Red Rabbit will be hopping its way up the bestseller lists in a matter of weeks (Michael Joseph, £18.99). Clancy rocketed to fame – the cliché isn’t inapt for such a notorious gizmologist, though he’d no doubt give you the make and serial number of the rocket in question ...”

“... or, as the bright, low sunlight suggests, the beginning or the end of the day. It might even be ‘one of those bright summer mornings we get in California before the high fog sets in’. Although Hopper was from the East Coast, sentences like the ones I’ve quoted from the opening of Chandler’s The Little Sister, and clips from Hollywood gangster ...”

“... the man who is accused of the murder of two small girls in Soham, whose deaths, as we now know by his own peculiar account, took place in his bathroom. Since one of the girls is held to have drowned in the bath, the prosecution saw fit to have this detachable part of the crime scene brought into court, to authenticate a pathologist’s testimony, even ...”

“... David Lassman, the director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath (Regency dress parade, bonnet-making workshops, ‘Tea with Mr Darcy’), submitted opening chapters and plot synopses of Austen’s novels to 18 British publishers and agents, changing just the titles and characters’ names. Lassman was ‘staggered’, he told the Guardian, when he received form letter rejections back ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... her litany stated, Mirror of Justice, Cause of Our Joy, Spiritual Vessel, Mystical Rose, Tower of David, House of Gold, Ark of the Covenant, Gate of Heaven and Morning Star. Not a woman I liked, on the whole. She was the improbability at the heart of spiritual life; a paradox, unpollinated but fruitful, above nature yet also against nature. She could have ...”

“... imperialism’; and that, after spending a decade as a prominent Maoist, he was killed by a hit-and-run driver, in an apparent accident that conspiracy theorists have liked to construe as the work of the intelligence services. Now we have a thousand-page book to fill in the details of his life, written with affection, humour and perspicacity ...”

“... territory between Jordan and the sea: British Mandatory Palestine from 1920 to 1948 and controlled by Israel one way or another since 1967), which is about the size of New Hampshire or Wales, and has a smaller total population than Portugal or Ohio. And yet for decades that conflict must have filled more newspaper column inches and broadcasting airtime than ...”

“... death in 1999 things sped up. Peter Conradi’s portly authorised biography was smartly challenged by A.N. Wilson’s slimmer unauthorised memoir, Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her, a witty, affectionate, impious account which made disturbing suggestions about Bayley’s feelings towards his wife. There was also Iris, a film with Kate Winslet and Judi Dench as ...”

“... for Afghan friendship, this US-funded 300-mile ribbon of tarmac was plied for two decades by lorries and garishly painted buses with no concern for security. Among the passengers were half-stoned Western hippies on the overland trail through Asia. Then came civil war and in 1979 the Soviet invasion. Ambushes turned the highway into a death trap until ...”

“... it’s a stuff within objects, awaiting release. In which case, homo sapiens becomes sapient by dowsing for that flow – or, to switch metaphors, by seeking spark-points where that fire will catch to illuminate the world. Engraved ochre block, c.75,000 BCE Was it in some such matrix that the concepts ...”

“... York Review of Books that he never left. These writers are dead now, and the only thing that can be said with certainty is that, of the three, Bellow got the best biographer. This first volume by Zachary Leader might be the most intelligent, fair-minded and most carefully furnished Life ...”

“... of Scottish independence. The impact of this on the crisis of Labourism, old and new, should not be underestimated. It is the most dramatic change in the UK party system since the foundation of the Labour Party itself. Add to this the following facts: 11.3 million votes obtained 331 seats for the Conservatives; 9.3 million got Labour 232 MPs, the Liberal ...”

“... so many of them have spent their adult lives agitating for this moment. Their approach appears to be a version of Napoleon’s battle strategy: ‘On se dégage, et puis on voit.’ What exactly is Out supposed to entail? How do they picture Britain’s relationship with the EU, and with the rest of the world, after they’ve secured a vote for Exit on 23 ...”

“... chuckings-out. At least seven of its former leaders are no longer members of the party. It would be a pity, all the same, if the present leader, Gerard Batten, joined most of his predecessors in the ashcan of history. For Mr Batten deserves to be remembered, if only for the glorious letter he wrote to the queen at the end ...”