“... Davinder became Dave, Baljit Trevor. We learned Joyce Grenfell comic monologues off by heart, read short stories by Arthur Quiller-Couch – anything we thought would make us truly English. Not only would we laugh at malicious jokes – ‘Why do Pakis never play football? Because every time they get a corner they build a shop on it’ – but, eager to ...”

“... of a poor settler family – his own family – in Algeria. If Sartre and his circle had lived to read it, they might have forgiven Camus for brandishing his proletarian credentials in Paris. In La Peste, Rieux the doctor is a model of fortitude (a good novel with an irreproachable citizen at its centre; how hard is that to write?). But there is also an ...”

“... Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Penn Warren, Peter Matthiessen, Philip Roth, Irwin Shaw and the always vivacious William Burroughs (‘He is an absolutely astonishing personage, with the grim mad face of Savonarola and a hideously tailored 1925 shit-coloured overcoat and scarf to match with a grey fedora ...”

“... the law for four years, we’ll make it through those four years.’ Or consider the message read out to Vice President-elect Mike Pence by the cast of Hamilton after he attended a performance: ‘We are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us ...”

“... schools – and that was only ‘the tip of the iceberg’, according to the report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach British values. In November, the DfE issued what it called ‘strengthened guidance’ on ‘promoting British values in ...”

“... most obsessions, this one took a while to get going. In my twenties, as a literature student, I read and acquired the obvious classics: Graves, Owen, Sassoon, Remarque, Barbusse, Brittain, Fussell. But I had lots of other fads and hobbies going too: opera, Baroque painting, Kurosawa films, the Titanic, the Romanovs, trashy lesbian novels. Sometimes my ...”

“... joined MI6 in 1941, he doubted that ‘there was one man [there] at that time, who had read Mein Kampf’. Indeed, Hitler’s rise to power made virtually no impression at all on the ‘defenders of the realm’, except as an opportunity to expand the franchise on anti-communist surveillance. To this end, officers of Special Branch – the ‘arms ...”

“... the cognoscenti for her reclusive style of life and the zen-like austerity of her vision. I first read about her in the 1970s in a weird stream-of-consciousness piece in the Village Voice by the then-radical-lesbian writer Jill Johnston. Johnston – herself once a fixture in the New York art world – described making a kooky pilgrimage to New Mexico to find ...”

“... good to eat.’ Packets of biscuits were lying there and a giant heap of broccoli. Martin read out some of the labels: ‘Chicken and stuffing. Yorkshire pudding. Cashew nuts. Bananas. Three chicken pies. Yesterday.’ The lady in the claret hat came up to the door of the van to ask if we had any butter or bread. ‘Mince?’ asked ...”

“... to appear to be setting the terms of the dispute. She remained reliant on her energy secretary, Peter Walker, whom she didn’t trust and feared would do ‘a fudge, like Pym and the Foreign Office in the Falklands had tried to do’. But unlike Pym, Walker kept his job, because she didn’t dare sack him. In some respects her role in the miners’ strike ...”

“... inspector who struck him in a wholly unsuccessful attempt to extract a confession from him. As I read the minority’s dissent, the Court of Appeal would, if satisfied that this incident had taken place, be bound to set him free. But I have to say that to me this is taking the ideology of due process too far. If that is the, or a, conclusion entailed by ...”

“... surprised to find that this was one of the points Hans was to make in his 75th-birthday tribute to Peter Pears, published in 1985. His salute opened with one of those magisterial rebukes, ‘Every musician knows that normally singers are amongst the most unmusicianly, if not indeed unmusical, members of our profession,’ but went on to praise Pears (as ...”

“... songs of peace to all his neighbours:God shall be truly known; and those about herFrom her shall read the perfect ways of honour,And by those claim their greatness, not by blood.It isn’t clear that these lines were intended as a wholehearted endorsement of nostalgia for the old queen and her times. Only a decade after her funeral, there may have been as ...”

“... both right in itself and in their interest, a self-consciously centrist political leader tends to read the present disposition of political conviction (or prejudice or apathy) as a given, positioning himself at the midpoint of that imagined spectrum. In place of a political philosophy, a centre party of this kind relies on the psephological equivalent of a ...”