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“... of the New Deal. The key players were Thomas Carver, a Harvard professor of economics, and Leonard Read, who created the Foundation for Economic Education; the emigré Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises was a member, while Hayek gave his warm support. Later fans included Reagan and Thatcher, who found his theories ‘elegant and powerful’. So ...”

“... Ronnie Kray, performance artist and comedian of terror, was beginning to lose his audience. Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read’s weasels were infecting the landscape with rumours: all the creeping, ugly dream-things the Twins had always vigorously suppressed were daring to emerge by daylight. The aura of magical protection ...”

“... in need of being reconstructed.’ Their generation, he claimed, ‘grew up backwards … We read Joyce before we read Tolstoy. The gods we were told about were Pynchon and high modernism. Experimentation was the norm for us. Then we found out what the modernists were rebelling against.’ Eugenides studied at Brown ...”

“... but wouldn’t that be pretty much tautological? Certainly readers of George V. Higgins and Elmore Leonard would be surprised by the claim as it stands. Binyon also accepts without questioning the distinction between detective fiction and thrillers, or what he sometimes calls adventure stories. This is a familiar distinction, and in certain ways a real ...”

“... in 1961. A few months before I presented my cheque for 50 pounds to my bank, the first volume of Leonard Woolf’s autobiography, Sowing, was published. It covered his own origins and early years, as well as the origins of the Bloomsbury Group in Cambridge and among that famously secret society known as the Apostles. The fifth and last volume of this ...”

“... may be charged with filling the ear more than the mind.’ Without comparing the two Thomsons, Leonard shows by quotation that the Victorian (1834-82) is the greater poet. He shows, too, that the later Thomson’s life reflects the state of Britain more fully than other poets of his age excepting G. M. Hopkins and Hardy. Before describing how Places of the ...”

“... different historical periods: the result has all the narrative elegance of overcooked spaghetti. Read allegorically, Misery’s writing-treadmill-with-torture expresses King’s jaundiced view of the genre author-reader relationship, and its mutual imprisonments. The fan is a monster who first makes you famous and then traps you in the fame like a wasp in a ...”

“... of the 19th, were equally unsuccessful in their Utopian endeavours, for reasons well summarised by Leonard Elmhirst, founder of Dartington Hall School: ‘they disregarded sound economics, they followed some ethical or theoretical principle too rigorously, or they attempted to isolate themselves too completely from the social and economic world around ...”

“... work and exercise, to insist on isolation, weight gain, and extended rest in bed: ‘ “you shant read this” and “you shant write a word” and “you shall lie still and drink milk.” ’ With its ban on reading and writing, Woolf’s summary of her doctors’ orders constitutes a literary patient’s version of the ‘rest cure’, 19th-century ...”

“... to look at its chief characters and implications. Our first innocent is a young Englishman called Leonard Marnham, an electrician involved in the wiring of the equipment in the aforementioned tunnel. He meets Maria, an attractive German woman, and McEwan’s prose enters a realm of stealthy double-entendre which recalls the hint-filled atmosphere of Henry ...”

“... on her in 1946 by the black dogs of the title. In The Innocent, set in Berlin in the mid-1950s, Leonard Marnham, a telephone communications specialist, is having an affair with Maria Eckdorf, a German. But they murder Maria’s ex-husband and dismember his body and find that their relationship can’t survive that traumatic experience. The central ...”

“... Having read some of Henry Brewster’s letters to Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf wrote to Ethel that she found them ‘very witty, easy, well written, full of sparks and faces and shrewdness’, though she admitted that she got ‘a little tired of the lunches and dinners and Pasolinis and Contessa this and that’. Most important, however, the letters lacked intimacy ...”

“... One of the strangest things Virginia Woolf ever did was to travel with Leonard to Germany for part of their annual holiday in April 1935. The vigour of German anti-semitism was by this point clear and Hitler’s power and at least some of his worst intentions towards Britain were recorded by Woolf in her diaries (‘There is some reason I suppose to expect that Oxford Street will be flooded with poison gas one of these days ...”

“... to Italo Calvino, is ‘a book that has never finished saying what it has to say’. I have read Sylvia by Leonard Michaels four or five times and I still don’t feel that I’ve got to the bottom of it. First published in 1992, it is a novel disguised as a memoir, or a memoir disguised as a novel, based on the ...”

“... the timing of the tempest, she can always be helped out. One theory, quietly articulated in Elmore Leonard’s new thriller, is that the North Americans blew up the Maine themselves in order to start the war. Somewhere behind this notion lies the legendary cable Hearst is supposed to have sent to reporter Richard Harding Davis and cartoonist Frederic ...”