“... of response the book provokes, if it happens to do its thing for you. Nearly thirty years ago, David Lodge wrote a brilliant essay, called ‘The Modern, the Contemporary, and the Importance of Being Amis’, republished in his collection Language of Fiction (1966). All right, this essay said, so no one with any sense ever pretended that Lucky Jim was a ...”

“... in, such as Michael Winner’s Lawman or the Danny La Rue vehicle Our Miss Fred – or, indeed, David Essex’s Stardust. These films were out of reach, but only just out of reach. Forbidden fruit hanging almost low enough to be plucked.I knew that I wanted to read Offbeat as soon as I saw that it contained a chapter dedicated to the history of the AA ...”

“... no significant sense of himself as having a past or future. So too Antonio Damasio’s patient ‘David’, who cannot learn any new fact at all … He knows very little about himself except his name. He talks to you very charmingly, even intelligently … Left to his own devices, he sustains purposeful behaviour relative to the context he is in for many ...”

“... Julius, once Princess Diana’s divorce lawyer and the courtroom nemesis of the Holocaust denier David Irving, said I hadn’t been invited to carry out an audit. He left before the soup course. Marian told us that Dau’s current backer (earlier, a string of Russian, Ukrainian and West European cultural agencies had put up millions of roubles, hryvnyas and ...”

“... least in her marriage to the very dashing, wonderfully intelligent, but ultimately incompetent, David Child. He, too, struggled to overcome a modest background through intellectual and, in his case, political and financial, achievement. Unlike her, he failed. And for six years in the middle of their fifty-year-long, childless marriage, when her career was ...”

“... Modern​ Hollywood isn’t really Hollywood – it’s Calabasas. With everyone now the David O. Selznick of his own social picture, gossip replaced with tweets, and fan magazines with selfies, the grandeur of old Hollywood can seem mythical. Like proper myths, its stories are almost exclusively about metamorphosis, self-destruction and things going wrong, but they are at least stories as opposed to advertisements ...”

“... had infiltrated the Sangatte camp. A year later, with the agreement of the then home secretary, David Blunkett, and his French equivalent, Nicolas Sarkozy, the camp was closed. Blunkett called the Sangatte site ‘a festering sore in Anglo-French relations’. Sarkozy spun its closure as an act of goodwill towards migrants: ‘We have put an end to a ...”

“... policy concern and was seen as not only un-British, but as a state security concern. In 2015 David Cameron called on institutions to devise their own ‘sensible rules’ about face veils, and Michael Wilshaw, the head of Ofsted, promised that schools would take a firm lead. He declared that ‘our liberal West values’ must be protected and added that ...”

“... his Irishness, but the editors of this new edition of Goldsmith’s letters, Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy, urge its importance, and they are surely right. Some of the ideas that persistently recur in Goldsmith’s work – opposition to imperialism, scepticism about English notions of liberty – seem to be manifestations of his nationality. He ...”

“... of sex (see innumerable campus novels and many of the works of the postwar American writers whom David Foster Wallace derided as ‘the Great Male Narcissists’). On the page, though, the resulting hybrid is anything but ungainly, and in any case the narrator is out ahead of both types of reader, pointing to Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee, a touchstone both for ...”

“... world wars, Joan of Arc and General de Gaulle are central to the French national self-image and F.D. Roosevelt is central to the story of America’s interwar economic recovery, and Nelson Mandela is central to South Africa’s new-found racial harmony. Exalted company for our two great heroes – but surely justified? Not according to the great British ...”

“... original sin, secularised as the problem of anti-social behaviour, has been remarkably resilient. David Trotter believes that what we have learned to call Modernism is more akin to the cumulative trauma of secularisation, and that if we can’t get a wholly convincing sense of the beginnings of Modernism, we can get the next best thing: a sense of what the ...”

“... pleasure that remains to me: I indulge in reading about movies with undiminished enthusiasm. David Thomson has written about his disappointment with contemporary cinema, about how the franchise movie and the blockbuster are killing Hollywood and his hopes, and because I am one of the legion of Thomson’s devoted fans, it cheers me up to hear it. If he ...”

“... were not strictly personal property. In his essay on Warsaw apartments in the 1950s and 1960s, David Crowley quotes Czeslaw Milosz’s remark that ‘to protect his position and his apartment (which he has by the grace of the state), the intellectual is prepared to make any sacrifice or compromise; for the value of privacy in a society that affords little ...”

“... topos of visionary architecture runs back at least to the 1960s), and its scheme is very sci-fi. The ‘Millennium Tower’, a diamond-gridded cone of 170 storeys set two kilometres out in Tokyo Bay, recalls, all at once, the Eiffel Tower, the utopian projects of Russian Constructivism, the dark Deco city of Metropolis and the gigantic geodesic dome that ...”