Nevertheless, reclamatory questions do not constitute a counterexample to my proposal, but rather provide evidence to strengthen it. They neatly differ from other repetitive interrogatives in a significant way: they are manifestly used to elicit […]

He takes his bottle of whisky a day and gets drunk’s a lord in the evening.

Quietly, faithfully, their late-paid, ill-paid or altogether unpaid works go into the world untrumpeted, unreviewed and unbought, to give the lie to the fallacy denounced by Annie Dillard a quarter-century ago: “that the novelists of whom we have heard are the novelists we have.”

I was running short, so I touched old Bertie for a fiver.