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“... Any Dick Francis novel about horses and crime satisfies my definition of a myth: like a myth, it is one of a corpus of interrelated stories (most, though not all, about horses, and many about an ex-jockey named Sid Halley) held sacred by a group (Dick Francis fans, or Franciscans of a sort, Francisfans, who recognise one another, like ((Star)) Trekkies, across several continents, without benefit of secret handshake or decoder ring) over a period of time punctuated by ritual events: once a year since 1962, when, after a long career as a champion National Hunt jockey, he published his first novel, Dead Cert, we have celebrated the new Francis novel ...”

“... from his femur, an ear almost torn off, a fractured skull, fifteen years’ worth of headaches – Dick Francis devotes two chapters of his biography to injuries alone. It was no doubt a marketing man’s dream to bring Piggott and Francis together for the official version. Each king in his own field – they even raced ...”

“... Tale? The closest thing to a horse in the play is that notorious bear. Acevedo sticks to Dick Francis, who inspires him to ‘become the first Mexican steeplechase jockey to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup’. Deirdre Donohue, a disillusioned Irish trainer, takes the complete works of Shakespeare with her on a cruise to Alaska, as she looks for ways ...”

“... as you say then fucking get up, or if it’s too early or something then put the light on and read Dick Francis.’ And then what? Sit and wait for it to go away – the feeling, and the poem? Amis believes it was ‘fear of failure’ that prevented Larkin from persisting in his attempts to be a novelist. ‘No poem of Philip’s preferred length lays ...”

“... for anyone else; like all jargon, it is exclusive. Fortunately, both writers use it sparingly. Dick Francis is unusual in being able to arouse in the pedestrian reader some of a jockey’s excitement, though many jockeys have experienced the thrill of winning an important race. Many more people have experienced the thrill of ‘losing it’ in a ...”

“... within a milieu, and the well-worked plot, make the book something like a much-better-than-usual ...”

“... Kingsley, however, didn’t like anybody’s novels apart from those of Anthony Powell and Dick Francis, and his absolute honesty about this was a crucial part of his character. As Martin says, in some absolutely central way, Kingsley refused to make allowances for anyone, ever. He never faked interest in anything. This appears to have made him a ...”

“... reviewer and essayist, he gave respect and appreciation to such various talents as Ian Fleming and Dick Francis, Michael Innes and Gladys Mitchell – all British writers. It is hard to believe that he hadn’t read, at some time between its first British publication in 1943 and the writing of ‘High Windows’ in 1967, a book by the writer regarded by ...”

“... go together. To the hunters, what they do touches the whole structure of the world: Moby Dick, annually. To the reader, the hunt confirms Lowen-stein’s extraordinary achievement in focusing and re-composing the mysteries of his source material. The kill achieved, everyone rejoices. Even the whale is pleased once its severed head has been dropped ...”

“... When he imagined a literary critic, the figure that sidled onto the page was contrastingly feeble. Dick Minim, protagonist of two essays in the Idler, arrives at his profession ‘after the common course of puerile studies, in which he was no great proficient.’ Inheriting a large fortune, he starts to while away his time in London coffee ...”

“... of Captain Ahab. Only Richard Henry Dana in Two Years Before the Mast and, in The Oregon Trail, Francis Parkman, whose homosexual proclivities deserve more attention here, come forward as relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types – William James being another and later example – to mistake manhood for the ...”

“... making ‘as it were a show of childish marriage, of calling each other husband and wife’. Francis Segar, trying to teach decorum in 1557, criticised those boys who came out of school ‘running like a heap of bees … whooping and hallooing as in hunting the fox’.But if children have remained much the same, the concept of childhood has changed ...”

“... young Boswell was always trying on new personalities and describing them to himself in his diary. Francis Dashwood, prime mover in the notorious set later known as the Hellfire Club, was not only a member of the Dilettanti but also of the much more respectable, not to say staid, Society of Antiquaries. The particular characteristic of the Dilettanti, at least ...”

“... acts. The North Water is self-consciously literary, thick with allusions to other books: Moby-Dick, obviously (Sumner is less Ishmael than Ahab by the time he limps off across the ice in pursuit of a white bear); Conrad (there’s something of Lord Jim about Sumner, trying to redeem his shameful past, and more than a little of Kurtz in Drax); Elizabeth ...”

“... of crystal meth. By the time you come up for air on page five, you’ll have been introduced to Dick Nixon’s political ghost, an ARVN position under the clotted Vietnamese sky, and Solomon Rainbolt, an attorney who can make a jury eat his shorts and convince them it was fettuccine al fredo. I will not say that Crumley is a bald-faced liar, but for a ...”