“... and cover a few boos, with a rendition of ‘Congratulations’, a song once sung by Cliff Richard to remind people that happiness is a feeling constantly under threat from the songs that celebrate it. ‘Beautiful white dress,’ the woman from the BBC said. ‘Hardly white,’ the person beside me said. ‘She’s got two huge children.’ ‘It ...”

“... to become governing rhetoric.At the office one morning at the end of August, I was approached by Richard Johnson, the editor of the New York Post’s gossip column, Page Six. Every day, a photocopied packet of the gossip columns from the national and local papers was prepared by the interns at George. This was one way to keep up with public versions of ...”

“... takes me aback by talking to me not about financial regulation but about having been assigned to read my book Relative Deprivation and Social Justice when he was an undergraduate. What, he asks, am I writing now? I tell him I have just published a long-gestated volume about the sociology of 20th-century England. What I don’t tell him is that it ...”

“... like this.’ But the paradoxical gusto and linguistic inventiveness of the writing (judging by Richard Lourie’s confident translation), and its rapid and always disconcerting shuffling of tones (lyrical, affectionate, snide, farcical, grumpy, bitter), manage to prevent our feeling as with André Brink that postures are being adopted in careful conformity ...”

“... church. A mile or so beyond looms a larger sight that Rodinsky was spared: the 52 floors of Richard Seifert’s Natwest Tower, double-decker lifts, automatic window-washing facilities and all. Here again was the characteristic frisson of the zone of transition, where different worlds rub up against one another, languages intersect on every corner and ...”

“... proprietor of the small yet reliable magazine Antichrist. This Ravelston – some composite of Sir Richard Rees and John Middleton Murry – was a hedonistic yet guilt-ridden dilettante, good in a pinch, and soft on poets, but too easily embarrassed by brute exigence. Saul Bellow – who has already shown a vulnerability to exigent poets in his wonderful ...”

“... Yoghurt? No. Pizza? Don’t be stupid. Keen’s cheddar? Perfect. Then I went upstairs and read Emmanuel Carrère’s biography of Philip K. Dick for half an hour or so.† Then I tried to sleep. There are quite a large number of books about how to get a good night’s sleep, and good ‘sleep hygiene’ in general, and not a single one of them ...”

“... Karl Ove had prematurely creamed at my entrance. (Don’t worry, we’re safe here: he doesn’t read reviews.)What does the star interrupt? Do people know that they are in the Bible? From the changed sky, modest plagues descend. Turid sees freaky birds with human heads sail through the air; crabs in their hundreds cover the roads; Egil finds a shed skin, as ...”

“... new wave of furious proselytising for atheism (which includes not just Hitchens but people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett) is just another surrogate religion is a familiar one. It’s what the God-botherers always say about the God-bashers. But in the case of Christopher Hitchens it’s not entirely convincing. The ...”

“... took an interest in literary criticism, history and philosophy as well as society gossip. Richard Steele, the magazine’s editor and a friend of Swift’s, puffed the poet and his work in an introduction. This new writer, he said, deserved to be read and admired because he had ‘run into a Way perfectly new, and ...”

“... to show fear’ – but also glamorous, romantic and politically safe. The novels, still widely read yet less influential in popular culture than that one film, are different. In their relative unfamiliarity we may find it easier to distinguish the melodramatic and the exaggerated from glimpses of the actual era. They portray mid-century America as a place ...”

“... taste. She did not underestimate the stir due to a new Austen work. Well before we could read the play, we could hear tantalising snatches of it in a film which began by re-enacting the Sotheby’s auction – Jane Austen in Manhattan, directed by James Ivory and scripted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Jane Austen’s contribution to the film was ...”

“... the prefaces and acknowledgments were ripped away; if you’d never watched American television or read the US papers; if all you had were the texts and you read them from cover to cover, would you know who Bob Woodward is? No, you wouldn’t, but if you read the jackets, acknowledgments ...”

“... career comes with its own creation myth. He had been making no headway until in 1956 Edith Sitwell read a privately printed book of his stories and, ravished, threw herself into finding him a publisher and an audience. In one version of the event, Don’t Call Me by My Right Name, the book Purdy sent from America to Italy, made the last stage of its journey ...”

“... or messengers. Ellison’s dream was of a different kind. His friends included the black novelist Richard Wright and critics like Kenneth Burke and Stanley Edgar Hyman; his heroes were Joyce and Eliot; he studied The Golden Bough for the mythical themes he hoped would make his novel immortal. Ellison aspired mightily and he dressed the part as he imagined ...”