“... to death. The 415 pages of this anthology won’t kill you – nor will you go blind – but you may from time to time feel queasy. An anthology of sex is something of a bathhouse, back-alley enterprise. Here are passages without antecedent or consequence, brief, sometimes anonymous; sometimes gratifying enough, in a casual sort of way. Writing about sex is ...”

“... the damage done to the body by toxic chemicals. If she is right, something of a global holocaust may await us. Not only have entire animal populations been wiped out by becoming unable to reproduce: a whole series of disturbing biological defects is already observable among humans and these are likely to become more and more damaging in the near-future. Theo ...”

“... Croisset, 15-16 May 1852. Saturday-Sunday, 1 a.m.The small hours of Sunday morning find me in the middle of a page that has taken me all day and is still far from finished. I am putting it aside to write to you, and in fact it may perhaps take me into tomorrow evening, since I often spend several hours looking for a word, and since I have several to find, it is quite likely that you would still be waiting all next week if I were to wait until I had finished ...”

“... is a chilling absurdity’. This chilling absurdity is followed by more of the same. It may be unreasonable to expect books about heroic authors to be heroic, or books about deeply funny authors to be deeply funny, but if any heroics or any jokes occur they should at least be intended. Allowing for a slightly surprising tendency on the part of Amis ...”

“... the forces of order and control – not only the police but also the CRS (one of the slogans of May 1968 was ‘CRS-SS’), the secret service and the entire state security apparatus. There is no place for Snowden or Manning in this new universe. ‘Resentment against the police is no longer what it was, except among poor youth of Arab or African ...”

“... public that watching porn is something lots of adults like to do. (It’s hard to imagine Theresa May gearing up to speak on the matter. Or Philip Hammond. Boris Johnson perhaps, but he’s off the pitch.) And yet the craftier Tories, if any still exist, may see this as an advantage: the party can adopt its ...”

“... In May​ 2014, the bodies of two teenage girls were found hanging from the branches of an old mango tree in the Badaun district of Uttar Pradesh. The nooses had been fashioned from their own dupattas. Relatives and neighbours from nearby villages came to the orchard in solidarity and mourning. The police arrived, but the families refused to let them cut the bodies down ...”

“... was produced.’ O my America!Mr Osborne’s accounts exhibit a certain Schadenfreude, which may or may not contribute to the sense of desolation imparted by the second half of the book. The later stories suggest that Auden’s life became ever more of a performance; some of them suggest a show (and more than a ...”

“... on Canvey, a suburban island. The protagonist, Wesley, is either the leader or the target of what may or may not be a cult, depending on how you read things. He sleeps rough, eats gulls, makes his own shaving foam, and is pursued by between two and a dozen stalkers, whom he calls the Behindlings. They are people whose lives ...”

“... Conservative precepts. The private sector knows, and grows, best. The City is untouchable: it may be chastised, but never seriously confronted. Unemployment is a form of dependency, best dealt with through market discipline. Competition is the law of all social and economic life, and it is the role of the state to encourage it and to secure public ...”

“... the Israeli word not just for the Palestinians but for the Arabs as a whole – may have the last laugh. Not only did Hamas put up a better fight than it had in the last war, it averted an Israeli ground offensive, won implicit recognition as a legitimate actor from the United States (which helped to broker the talks in Cairo), and achieved ...”

“... when he was trying to finish A Passage to India). The verses are trivial but the need for them may seem urgent if one considers the emotional demands that inspired a now celebrated diary entry of 1935: ‘I want to love a strong young man of the lower classes and be loved by him and even hurt by him. That is my ticket.’ This is a mood to be remembered ...”

“... who lives upstairs, who is called Maya or perhaps Moira. She plays the piano heartbreakingly, and may be the daughter of a judge; she sleeps with strangers in the park and writes him letters on pink paper telling him she has slashed her wrists. In one of the letters she signs herself Chiang Ching; she might be Chinese. Fritz considers nailing his hand to his ...”

“... from Ben Jonson to Martin Amis, normally disapprove of such sentences; but aposiopesis may be allowed as a structural feature, as when Yeats ends his ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ by claiming that he cannot continue his roll call of Gregory’s friends because ‘a thought/Of that late death took all my heart for speech.’ We ...”

“... Within a year or two, suitcase-sized nuclear weapons (crafted in Pakistan or North Korea) may be commercially available. Eager customers will include not only rich playboys like Osama bin Laden but also the leaders of various irredentist movements that have metamorphosed into well-financed criminal gangs. Once such weapons are used in Europe, whatever ...”