“... by the big battalions of the old parties. Survival rather than advance would be the order of the day. But, perversely, a full five-year Parliament has been a blessing. The transition to the final, electioneering phase is occurring with three-and-a-half years gone (the average life of a peacetime Parliament). It is also occurring as the SDP completes its own ...”

“... I began reading these books on a long-haul flight. Passengers were also handed copies of that day’s Financial Times. It was 18 April and the paper’s centre pages were devoted to the imminent bankruptcy of General Motors. Unnerved by receiving a mere $13.4 billion from US taxpayers, the company’s chief executive, Fritz Henderson, was reported as ...”

“... courts, with a horrible aggrieved solicitor to the fore. And then at Hillsborough the other day a mass of Liverpool fans arrived late at the turnstiles with the emptying of the pubs, and struggled to be let in. A gate was opened for safety’s sake, and they rushed, undirected, into the ground, causing more deaths. Blame was heaped on the Police, and ...”

“... and most intensive (and enjoyable) of my ten Parliamentary contests. But long before Polling Day I realised that the national campaign had not acquired the momentum essential to a breakthrough. Only a single party with a single leadership could compete successfully and win public confidence. At the time of the Limehouse Declaration, there were no ...”

“... and bars, sometimes observed clutching at park railings as he made his unsteady way home after a day’s drinking. With such fame as he then enjoyed arising from his newspaper work rather than his more or less forgotten novels, the columns became ever less exuberant and ever more tetchy and cynical. As Joseph O’Connor wrote: ‘His fate, at least I think ...”

“... content: she convinces him to help her start a live-streaming service that runs sixteen hours a day, then makes him get double eyelid surgery. The procedure goes wrong and he has to have both of his eyeballs removed. Tulathimutte is engaging here in a kind of hysterical augmentation, a gothic enlargement of the sort that influencers undertake when they ...”

“... Tree Duck are so familiar that I suspect it’s actually a work of non-fiction. So if you thought Neil Sheehan’s A Bright and Shining Lie was the final, National-Book-Award-winning word on what happened in Vietnam, wait until you meet C.W. Sughrue and Millard Fillmore, a goose. James Crumley’s other detective novels, The Last Good Kiss, The Wrong Case and ...”

“... Engel reminds us of the sheer scale of Parliamentary coverage in earlier newspapers. On a single day in 1855, the Times carried 61,500 words of Parliamentary debate verbatim, considerably more than half the length of Engel’s book. These days, three thousand words of Parliamentary report is a great deal. The rest of what is said is spoken, for all practical ...”

“... The cultural compendiousness of ‘Postwar British’ and ‘World’s End’, dedicated to Neil Rennie, both of which have something of Rennie’s anthropological intelligence. The deployment, for once, of a more formal vocabulary in ‘Going Round Afterwards’ and the fine elegiac sequence for Hugh Williams, ‘Death of an Actor’, where the ...”

“... on which to lead, as full of purple prose today as it was twenty years ago. It should be a good day for sales. To the Express, the Mail and the Mirror, sales are important. Together they sold over twelve million copies every day in the early Sixties. Twenty-five years later, they sell not much over half of that, and the ...”

“... defended the police and their new powers, saying that people have the right ‘to go about their day-to-day lives without facing serious disruption’. ‘Serious disruption’ – a phrase that appears 94 times in the Public Order Act – now legally includes many of the mildest tactics used by activist groups from the ...”

“... to Gatwick to chant: ‘Don’t unpack, you must go back.’ In local elections on 6 May (the same day as the Mirror’s story), the Front’s 168 candidates secured an average vote of 8.9 per cent. During a Commons debate in July, John Stokes, the Conservative MP for Halesowen and Stourbridge, a former admirer of General Franco and a supporter of the Monday ...”

“... to come less than 2 per cent behind. At Airdrie and Shotts, in post-industrial Lanarkshire, Alex Neil of the SNP spectacularly broke through to seize the constituency from Labour by a majority of 2000. Airdrie was once coal and shale-oil mining, Shotts was coal and a great ironworks. I have known Alex as a friend for many years; son and grandson of South ...”

“... charges while the staff, who are actually at death’s grip with them, hour after hour and day after day, are supposed to represent ‘hierarchy’. Well might Dr Rae suggest that ‘public school headmasters are political animals.’ But he is less than frank in his characterisation of the species. ‘Whatever other ...”

“... rates, municipalise utilities, take out vast loans and allocate city funds. Now he might start the day waiting anxiously for a ministerial Rover and spend the rest of it shuffling a Parliamentary Under Secretary around crumbling city ‘no-go areas’ in the hope of some beneficence from Whitehall departments. And he wouldn’t get any money until he’d ...”