Forty Days of Tucker J. by Robert Leeson (Fontana Lions 1983)

Tucker walked outside. Paddy was still there.

Hello, Peter, then. I see you've joined the toiling masses.'

'Wish I had, Paddy. Are you out of work, then?'

Paddy smiled: 'No, I'm not. I'm doing this for a friend. Just to give a hand, like.'

Tucker took a leaflet and walked away reading it.

'Fight for the Right to Work' said the leaflet.

They must be joking.

Joe College by Tom Perrotta (St Martin's Griffin 2000)

Only Howard Friedlin seemed oblivious to the now-public drama of my love life. He was too busy glowering at the copy of Reality he'd unearthed from the bottom of the coffee-table pile.
"What about Max?" Mrs. Friedlin asked. "Does he have a girlfriend too?"
Before I could answer, Mr. Friedlin raised the magazine like a kindergartner at show-and-tell. He tapped his index finger against the cover photo of the mangy constipated dog, hunched and grimacing.
"What the hell is this?" he demanded.
"A literary magazine," Sang replied cheerfully. "Danny here is one of the editors."
Mr. Friedlin gave me a look of incomprehension worthy of my own father.
"Did you intend it as some kind of statement?" He pronounced his last word with genuine distaste, as if we all knew about statements.
"It is what it is," I informed him, grinning like an idiot. I felt positively giddy. Polly wanted to sleep with me. She'd said so over the phone. "It's just reality."
"Why don't you just photograph some dog shit?" he asked. "That's part of reality, too."
"They're saving that for the spring issue," Ted explained helpfully.

Dark Entries by Ian Rankin and Werther Dell'edera (Vertigo Crime 2009)

Tepper Isn't Going Out by Calvin Trillin (Random House 2001)

"I wouldn't have thought you were a reader of the East Village Rag." Tepper said. "Is there something I've missed about you all these years?"
My niece sent it to me," Gordon said. "She lives on Rivington Street. I don't know if that's included in what they call the East Village. We still call it the Lower East Side. You don't even want to know what she paid for the apartment. A co-op. A co-op on Rivington Street! I told her that her great-grandparents worked sixteen hours a day just to get out of Rivington Street. What was cooperative about those buildings when they lived in them was the bathroom. Now whatever miserable cold-water flat my grandparents lived in has probably been made into a co-op. For all we know, that may be her co-op. She may be paying thousands to live in the place her great-grandparents worked themselves to death so their children wouldn't have to live in. What a city."

Thank You For Smoking by Christopher Buckley (Harper Perennial 1994)

The Captain snorted into his snifter. "You know, your generation of tobacco men - and women, I'm always forgetting to add 'and women' - think they have it harder than any generation who came before. You think it all began in nineteen fifty-two. Well, puh!"
puh?
"It's been going on for almost five hundred years. Does the name Rodrigo de Jerez mean anything to you?" Nick shook his head. "No, I suppose it doesn't. I suppose they don't teach history in the schools anymore, just attitude. Well, for your information, sir, Rodrigo de Jerez went ashore with Christopher Columbus. And he watched the natives 'drink smoke', as he put it, with their pipes. He brought tobacco back to the Old World with him. Sang its praises high to the frescoed ceilings. Do you know what happened to him? The Spanish Inquisition put him in jail for it. They said it was a 'devilish habit'. You think you have it bad having to deal with the Federal Tobacco Commission? How would you like to have to state your case before the Spanish Inquisition?"
"Well . . . ."
"You bet you would not. Remember that name, Rodrigo de Jerez. You're walking in his footsteps. He was the first tobacco spokesman.. I sppose he, too, found it 'challenging.'"
"Uh . . . "

Still Midnight by Denise Mina (Orion Books 2009)

Alex and Danny met on their first day at school. They looked like twins, everyone said so, it was an innocent joke. They were sweethearts for their first term of school but it all ended abruptly when their mothers met at the gates. The most vivid memory of Alex's early life was walkig home through a park, blood dripping from her sobbing mother's mouth onto the grey path. She'd ripped her blouse in the fight and everyone could see her bra strap.
People didn't move schools in those days. Danny and Alex went all the way through primary school together, and secondary. And all the time there was the ever present threat of their mothers fighting, of the other boot falling.

South Of The Border by Barbara Machin (The Women's Press 1990)

'The petrol gauge has always been knackered, you know that,' grumbled Finn as they rolled to a stop on a dirt garage yard outside a small bar. 'You've got to keep track of the mileage - I've warned you before.'
'But it never seems quite so crucial down Deptford High School, does it?' They'd glared at each other in the orange neon of the bar sign. 'OK' it flickered on and off uncertainly. Finn was unforgiving.
Striding across a yard littered with crashed cars, Pearl headed for the bar to find the owner. This is what she hated about foreign travel, she decided: this loss of balance, the confusion between the grateful smile and the come-on. A line so clearly visible in South London and so blurred here. She could be letting herself in for anything, just by being there. And smiling. Smiling was dangerous, but how else was she going to charm the guy into opening up his petrol station.

Lost In Music: a pop odyssey by Giles Smith (Picador 1995)

In 1985, the year before I became an official band member, one of Newell's regular mail-order clients in Germany took the cassette version of a collection of songs called Under Wartime Conditions, pressed it up as a vinyl album and distributed it to the stores. Newell was jubilant. This was, he reckoned, a real anarchist's triumph, a giant petrol bomb through the record companies' corporate windows. An album of songs made in his house in his spare time, using only a raddled guitar, an old piano with drawing pins in its hammers, a bass which was a barely modified plank, and a rusty xylophone, had gone down the system's blindside and made it right into the shops. 'And', he said victoriously, 'no one with a pony-tail and stupid plastic glasses came anywhere near it.'
So this was the Martin Newell whom I joined full-time in the Cleaners from Venus: an angered pop guerrilla with his own agenda, a one-man music-biz resistance unit.

Exit Music by Ian Rankin (Orion Books 2007)

'No one's about to poison me, Rebus. Sergei and me, we see things the same way. Few years from now, Scotland's going to be independent - not a shred of doubt about that. Sitting on thirty years' worth of North Sea oil and God alone knows how much more in the Atlantic. Worst-case scenario, we do a deal with Westminster and end up with eighty or ninety per cent of the cut.' Cafferty gave a slow shrug. 'And then we'll goand spend the money on our usual leisure pursuits - booze, drugs and gambling. Put a supercasino in every city, and watch the profits stack up . . .'
'Another of your silent invasions, eh?'
'Soviets always did think there'd be revolution in Scotland. Won't matter to you, though, will it? You'll be out of the game for good.' Cafferty gave a little wave of the hand and turned his back.

The Big Fix by Roger L. Simon (Warner Books 1973)

"Mr. Seymour Bittleman - you should pardon the expression - has made a ridiculous misinterpretation of history," she told the boys as they climbed onto her lap. "After seventy years of struggle, he now announces that Kautsky was correct at the Second International . . . Vey es Mir! . . . Don't you remember what Trotsky wrote in 'A Letter to Party Meetings,' that the Kautskian line leads to nothing but revisionism and Social Democracy?!"
"The rabbi of Kotzk said: Everything in the world can be imitated except truth. For truth that is imitated is no longer truth." Bittelman grinned and stabbed a piece of coldfish with his fork.
"Now what the hell does that mean?" She tugged at her babushka and made a face somewhere between Ethel Merman and La Pasionaria.
"The rabbi of Ger said: I often hear men say they want to throw up the world. But I ask you, is the world yours to throw up?"
"Shut up, Bittleman. I don't want you polluting these children's minds with your cheap religious talk. Next thing you know you'll be putting on a prayer shawl and quoting Hillel."
She turned away from him with a wave and I opened the lunch in front of us. Bittelman snickered and tucked a tiny napkin into his white shirt already stained with fish oil.

The Flood by Ian Rankin (Orion 1986)

He examined the faces along the edge of the bus, studying their reflections in the glass. The sun streamed in, and the tiny openings of the windows caused the passengers to broil. One old man looked on to the countryside as if surprised by it. His head shook like a clockwork toy. Sandy thought to himself that this man must have seen a lot of things - the war, the hunger of the Twenties and Thirties, death, decay, a quickly changing world. What good had it done him? He looked as if he might die at any moment, not having comprehended half of what he had seen in his life. Waste. That was the keyword. Perhaps Sandy would write a story about it all when he returned home. It seemed an important enough thing to write about. He wrote a lot of stories and poems in his room.

Little Children by Tom Perrotta (St Martins 2004)

And all at once, it came to Sarah: It was like being back at the Women's Center. For the first time since she graduated from college, she'd managed to find her way into a community of smart, independent, supportive women who enjoyed each other's company and didn't need to compete with one another or define themselves in relation to the men in their lives. It was precisely what she'd been missing, the oasis she'd been unable to find in graduate school, at work, or even at the playground. She'd searched for it for so long that she'd even come to suspect that it hadn't actually existed in the first place, at least not the way she remembered it, that it was more a product of her romantic undergraduate imagination than anything real in the world. But it had been real. It felt like this, and it was a huge relief to be back inside the circle again.

Mortal Causes by Ian Rankin (1994)

Wild Davey Soutar. He and his kind detested the Festival. It took away from them their Edinburgh and propped something else in its place, a facade of culture which they didn't need and couldn't understand. There was no underclass in Edinburgh, they'd all been pushed out into schemes on the city boundaries. Isolated, exiled, they had every right to resent the city centre with its tourist traps and temporary playtime.
not that that's why Soutar was doing it. Rebus thought Soutar had some simpler reasons. He was showing off, he was showing even his elders in The Shield that they couldn't control him, that he was the boss. He was, in fact, quite mad.

What's Going On? by Mark Steel (2008)

There's a layer of society brought up with the expectation that it will rule. At their schools, when they do subjects like the First World War, instead of being asked to write about what life must have been like shivering in a trench, they're asked to construct a battle plan for capturing Verdun. They consider, like Tony Blair, that to end up as a Headmaster would be a failure. Instead of being taught to respect authority they're taught to BE authority. They ooze confidence that it's hard not to be intimidated by. For example, I was contacted by an Eton student who wanted me to speak at his debating society. I was doing a national tour at the time, so I called him back to say it would have to be after that finished. He rang me back and left a message that went, 'Right. Now I've looked on your website and seen the dates of your shows, and you've got two days off one week so I'm booking you in to come down on the Tuesday. It's quite simple.' And the words 'quite simple' were imbued with a slight exasperation, as if he was having to take time out from an important meeting with an admiral to explain to the servants how to serve the pâté.
On the other hand, whenever starts a request, as most of us do, with 'Oh, eer hello, um sorry to bother you but I was just wondering' you know they didn't go to Eton.

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi (2002)