Andrew O’Hagan

“George W. Bush has boiled doublethink down to a sticky residue: ‘you’re either for us or you’re for the terrorists’ is its central flavour. But choosing New York for the convention was overweening even by Republican standards: like Woody Allen, only less humorously, they wanted the sweep of Manhattan to enlarge a panoply of private concerns, and blinded with tears and outrage, they wanted to forge a kind of unity in commemoration of the disaster.”

“More garish than a Mexican funeral, the Convention floor had swaying rows of evangelical grandmothers above an action-painting of shivering flags; tier upon tier of gleeful Democrats . . . Kerry was invisible, a force striding towards Boston to make himself new; he was a mood over the wires – hopeful, ambitious for change, well-meaning – but as the hours of tributes ran on you began to wonder if this liberal paragon was merely a liberal apparition, and even as that apparition came riding up the Charles River in the company of his Vietnam buddies, it seemed he might never step out of his own myth and become solid.”

Norman Tebbit announced the other day that Tony Blair’s government had made both obesity and Aids in this country much worse by doing ‘everything it can to promote buggery’. Aside from anything else, this comment might cause us to reflect (buggerishly) on the England beloved of bigots like Tebbit and to see it as a land not only of warm beer and cricket on the village green,...

‘It’s my feeling that she looked forward to her tomorrows,’ said Marilyn’s housekeeper, the last person to see her alive. But now we may be in a position to say that Marilyn Monroe’s tomorrows have stretched beyond any known horizon, becoming one of the publishing world’s core subjects. More than six hundred books have been produced about the late movie...

“The British lad magazine is not about men at all or about the business of being a grown-up person; it’s fuelled by a childish notion of hedonism – pills, thrills and bellyaches – which sees politics as a mug’s game and wives as a curse. They may be right about that, but if so they are right in a fairly boring way: no man older than 21 wants to be told they’re a failure unless they live like George Best.”