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“... block is as utopian as Verne’s submarine. Though it has a sufficiently mundane address (11 Rue Simon-Crubellier, Paris XVII) and though the narrative present can be precisely located in time (it is just before 8 p.m. on 23 June 1975), the last thing that Life: A User’s Manual sets out to do is to portray or comment on Parisian life in the Seventies. The ...”

“... gloss on Trump’s philosophy. In the first pages of his memoir, The Room Where It Happened (Simon and Schuster, £25), Bolton takes pains to lay out how busy he was before joining the Trump administration and how eagerly Trump’s team pursued him. The first jobs he was offered in the administration were not big or important enough: he turned down ...”

“... Everything else will be diffused to the community. Loosely directed by the head of NHS England, Simon Stevens, money, staff and new investment are being directed towards primary care – family doctors, community nurses, souped-up local clinics, systems to help the chronically unwell live at home. In universe two a counter-reality prevails: the reality of ...”

“... Men – they put on The Tragedy of Gowrie, a dramatisation of the attempted assassination of King James by John Ruthven, earl of Gowrie, in 1600. It was doubtless based on the official account, The Earle of Gowries conspiracie against the Kings Maiestie of Scotland. James encouraged frequent reprints of this pamphlet, and ...”

“... to the proximity of wealthy patrons such as the Earl of Southampton, the Earl of Pembroke and King James, might well have been an even more conspicuous and baroque monument than the one that now adorns Holy Trinity in Stratford – and with a life trajectory of province-to-capital rather than province-to-capital-and-back, I suspect Shakespeare would have been ...”

“... itself above all others: what do you do after the nouveau roman? Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon et compagnie redrew the map of what fiction might offer and aspire to, what its ground rules should be – so much so that some have found their legacy stifling. Michel Houellebecq’s response has been one of adolescent rejection, or, to use the type of ...”

“... officials to be arrested were Richard Trunkfield, a prison officer who had sold details about James Bulger’s killer Jon Venables; Alan Tierney, a Surrey police constable who was paid £1250 for passing information that John Terry’s mother had been cautioned for shoplifting, and Ronnie Wood for assaulting his girlfriend; and Tracy Bell, a pharmacy ...”

“... as ‘the most prominent UFO organisation in the United States’, the Hills consulted Benjamin Simon, a psychiatrist trained in hypnotic regression, who conducted sessions with them over the course of six months. The audio recordings of their conversations, available online, are disturbing. Describing the abduction, Barney in particular seems overwhelmed ...”

“... Self as a ‘stylisation of freedom’, produced out of an ‘aesthetics of existence’. When Simon Schama, in the overture to The Embarrassment of Riches, finds himself rather unconcerned about the actual existence of ‘the drowning cell’, in which, according to travellers’ tales, the incorrigibly idle were required to pump themselves away from ...”

“... but it was Rachel who haunted the English literary imagination throughout the 19th century. In James’s The Tragic Muse, the Jewish Cockney actress Miriam Rooth claims to be in the same style as ‘that woman’, and George Eliot’s Gwendolen Harleth foolishly thinks of herself as destined for stardom because she is more beautiful than the ‘thin ...”

“... the need for them, and since 1945 even minority governments have been exceptional. Only one, James Callaghan’s, was based on an agreement with another party, and the collapse of the Lib-Lab Pact brought the end of his administration. The present government is unique in being a peacetime coalition of two complete parties based on a negotiated ...”

“... for them. Recordings were designed to be accessible, but also to last. ‘From the Supremes,’ James Gavin writes, ‘Michael got his first taste of the catchy hooks and beats that made a pop song unforgettable.’ Or as Michael put it, ‘I knew how to make these records and make them jump out the radio.’In 1975, when Michael was twelve, his family ...”

“... these people and his fluency with their folktale motifs into a Midnight’s Children of Tangier. James Lasdun’s first collection of short stories, The Silver Age, doesn’t make much attempt to go in search of the ‘other’, but takes on what is perhaps a more severe challenge, present-day English middle-class life. Lasdun doesn’t ask What Then Must We ...”

“... The Moon is Down (‘That brainless pamphlet of monosyllables’, Stead called it) and by Simon and Schuster to do something like Gone with the Wind. With writers of Stead’s kind there is often, at least in the short term, a commercial problem in that the work does not only offer treasure, it makes demands. Henry ...”

“... Spectator, once suavely edited, now serves as a fraternity house for Douglas Murray, Toby Young, James Delingpole and Rod Liddle; pummelling Muslims and high-fiving on Brexit, these right-wing bros are to the posh periodicals what Jeremy Clarkson was to the BBC. Murray’s book-length screed, The Strange Death of Europe, is full of Trump-style imaginings of ...”