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“... X when he ghosted his autobiography? To what extent did Ted Sorensen create the verbal manner of John F. Kennedy when he wrote Profiles in Courage, a book for which the future president won the Pulitzer Prize? And are the science fiction stories H.P. Lovecraft ghosted for Harry Houdini not the best things he ever wrote? There would be a touch of all this in ...”

“... those Leicester evenings now thick with the whoosh and drone of the M1, the once innocent citizens no longer gathering spontaneously to pay rapt attention to a bird, but slumped at home watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? or surfing the Net for cheap holidays in Goa or the Gambia. The silence has certainly gone. There are now few places in Britain where ...”

“... of a picture he saw in Joyce’s Paris flat: the city of Cork in a cork frame. An instance, no doubt, of Joyce’s compulsive punning, the picture can also be viewed as the manifestation of an ambiguous attitude. The visual pun depreciates the city of Joyce’s forebears, suggesting the voluntary exile’s self-justifying, cosmopolitan hauteur: but it ...”

“... One and Hum Two, as they’re called. You’re seen, then there’s a note on your desk, you have no idea who did the noting. Nor do the guards at each reading-room entrance who have cameras that spy on every desk, but they’re incredibly quick if you pull a pen from a pocket. Yesterday I ran into J who was drinking coffee with her friend B; today I meet ...”

“... The Saatchi Gallery, now to be found in the old County Hall building, spreads itself down long corridors and through ranks of offices. Many of these contain single works. Only in the big rotunda are a substantial number of pieces seen together – among them Damien Hirst’s very large anatomical model and Ron Mueck’s very small sculpture Dead Dad ...”

“... of the History of Parliament (devoted to the House of Commons from 1754 to 1790 and edited by John Brooke and Namier himself), admiration for the scholarship of that and subsequent volumes in this extraordinarily learned enterprise has regularly been accompanied by acute uncertainty as to what purpose it is supposed to fulfil. How far the painstaking ...”

“... for a while. “So?” “So?” “So?”’ – and so on. The narrator of Carry Me Down is John Egan, an overgrown 11-year-old, who wants to find a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the first ever human lie detector, or polygraph, as he prefers to think of himself. (Hyland’s adolescents have the autodidact’s love of big words.) Bad lies make ...”

“... After the narrative had done with them, they were like friends who go to live in another town: no less solid because out of view. A character like Plantagenet Palliser ducks in and out of novels for the best part of two decades, evolving between his appearances from odious young prig to noble old man. Like wine in the cellar, he was maturing, even when we ...”

“... Everyone remembers what they were doing when John Kennedy was killed, but no one even asks what you were doing when Gerald Ford was President. The wonderfully comic, deviously historical premise of John Updike’s new novel is that someone asks ...”

“... merrily, gold watches glisten in the jewellers’ windows, but the faces are glum. There is no other point to the place except to enable wealthy folk to slide down the mountain into the shops and bars to spend their crisp Swiss francs. Except, that is, for one long weekend each year when two hundred people gather together in a ...”

“... Gallery basement, seventy-odd likenesses of the artist have been brought together. Its central hall, holding more than a dozen of the late self-portraits, compactly presents the case to be made for Rembrandt. The appeal of these paintings stems from our capacity to empathise with the subject. As we turn to the portraits, the subject’s eyes draw ours into ...”

“... true aristocracy: a clean tradition, culture, public spirit, honesty, courage ... It stands under no bond of obligation to the state; it has no public duty; it is transient and lacks a goal ...’ The subjects of these two books, the second Duke of Westminster and the American oil billionaire J. Paul Getty, almost too ...”

“... Milne or Ernest Pontifex suffer more at the hands of the elder generation? Hard to say. ‘No one, not even Cambridge, was to blame,’ as Auden wrote about the case of A.E. Housman. But Cambridge, however unexpectedly, was quite a lot to blame for the phenomenon of A.A. Milne and Pooh Bear, when they were very young. The atmosphere of enlightened ...”

“... or seven operas flourished in the theatre – nothing could have kept them down; so in the concert hall did the Requiem. All that is utterly changed. Verdi’s 26 operas (28 if you count revisions under new titles) have all been performed; few, perhaps two or three at most, seem unlikely to hold the stage. Julian Budden’s three-volume study is only the chief ...”

“... rely on snippets quoted (probably out of context) by the Red Guards, who labelled him ‘China’s No 2 Party Person in Power Taking the Capitalist Road’. His Selected Works are heavily edited and much less quirky than those of Mao. Travelling in China in 1976, as the battle raged between Deng and the Gang of Four, I was handed a sheaf of unpublished ...”