“... hybrids: satyrs, centaurs, minotaurs, mermaids; swan-Zeus, jackal-headed Anubis, shapeshifting fox-women.Closer to the present, in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), an Armenian shepherd confesses to being in love with his sheep, Daisy: ‘It was the greatest lay I ever had!’ In Edward Albee’s The ...”

“... It is not so clear that the Titanic would have remained in the collective memory without the war. Richard Davenport-Hines quotes Osbert Sitwell’s autobiography, in which he says that at the time he thought it foreshadowed disaster. But he was writing more than thirty years later. Only a few weeks after the sinking Conrad wrote that in its ...”

“... report stated: ‘We do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since Desert Fox to reconstitute its weapons of mass destruction programmes.’ In July 2001, I heard Condoleezza Rice say: ‘We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.’ On 11 September 2001, six hours after the attacks, I heard that ...”

“... an Arriva bus and quits Leeds via Hunslet, which also appears more or less obliterated since Richard Hoggart, who described its working-class culture so memorably in The Uses of Literacy, grew up there. Next comes Woodlesford, where McKie gazes round for any trace of the rhubarb for which the place was once well known, and we chug onwards to ...”

“... the prime minister complained that this was the wrong approach: ‘When my gamekeeper shoots a fox, he doesn’t go and hang it up outside the Master of Foxhounds’ drawing room; he buries it out of sight.’ To which Hollis might legitimately have replied that some gamekeepers had the sense to hang the vermin they had shot on the nearest fence to warn ...”

“... These men and women had been noticed before: they were the ‘silent majority’ invoked by Richard Nixon. The speechwriter who coined that phrase, Pat Buchanan, would become the insurgent Republican of the 1992 primaries, and at the 1992 party convention he gave a speech that seems the prototype for Trump’s inaugural. In fact, Trump delivered no ...”

“... whose splen did Mystical Bedlam used the casebooks of the astrological physician and divine Richard Napier to illuminate the mental world of the 17th century, and to suggest that mental alienation and distress might then have been dealt with in surprisingly sympathetic ways, joined in the chorus of condemnation of the ‘medical brutality’ which ...”

“... now Baron Hutton of Furness, or Bob Ainsworth, or the Conservatives’ Philip Hammond or Liam Fox – was prepared to answer. For those not directly affected, the acceptable form of exculpation and remembrance involves obliterating any consideration of dead Afghans and folding the British war dead into a single mass of noble hero-martyrs stretching from ...”

“... public that he had miraculously become a mature statesman. Meanwhile, the certifiably conservative Fox network, owned by Rupert Murdoch, resounded with calls for all-out war against an ill-defined enemy. When a former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia made the point that the United States has directly or indirectly visited a great deal of violence on the Middle ...”

“... Dennis Potter’s sexually provocative and formally challenging Singing Detective (1986) and Richard Eyre’s film of Charles Wood’s anti-Falklands Tumbledown (1988). When a newly aggressive ITV, freed from its franchise limitations by the 1990 Act, decided to make popular drama its flagship audience puller, BBC drama was faced with an unprecedented ...”

“... and Taylor was promoted from drama critic to editor, though with the politician and dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan managing the paper’s political department. This arrangement lasted for two years, until Sheridan, with whom Taylor, by his own account, was especially intimate, decided to position the Post further to the left, and fired his Tory ...”

“... now having damned everyone,’ she wrote to Lowell in 1959 after she had dissed Stanley Kunitz and Richard Wilbur, ‘I feel awfully cheered up.’) ‘If you want me to,’ she went on, I’d be glad to give you more benefits of my past experience in Rimbaud-translating. (But of course not if you don’t want me to.) … Sometimes it seems to me you sort of ...”

“... over English schools’. But by then the soundbites had gone round the world and back again – Fox News claimed Birmingham was a ‘no-go zone’ for non-Muslims, and that Birmingham’s schools were in crisis, especially Park View. Trustees resigned, staff resigned, others are still suspended pending disciplinary hearings. Pupils had cameras stuffed into ...”

“... shires, it turned out that the railways could energise, commercialise and broaden participation in fox hunting. Casual hunters were able to pay their dues and whizz off for a weekend’s hunting like modern middle-class city dwellers flying easyJet to the Alps for a skiing minibreak: A Londoner could hunt six days a week in season, meets being arranged on ...”

“... adventure for her. I seem to have been spared: restaurant clatter and the boomy voices of Fox News emanating from the big-screen TV at the bar, thank god, have clearly flooded out her hearing aids. Justice served too: Paris Hilton dragged shrieking back to jail after three days on the lam.My mother, 81 and widowed for 12 years, is ...”