“... both homely and exotic. Tethered to the stone wall, next to the manger, was what I recognised as a white-faced Hereford cow, like those which grazed around the farm where I was growing up. The incongruity was normal. Places I saw in my Bible (‘A Fountain at Nazareth’, ‘Road from Jerusalem to Jericho’), and heard about at Methodist Sunday school, were ...”

“... is that his 1970s-vintage literary models – among them Robert Stone, Joan Didion and Norman Mailer in Vietnam-era reportage mode – turned out to be pretty useful for a writer hitting his stride at the start of the 21st century. His main adjustments concern mood. For the pill-popping nerviness of Didion and Stone’s Americans abroad, he ...”

“... with the grossly unreconstructed interventions at the recent Conservative Party Conference by Norman Tebbit. Although most of his major works are out of print, Carlyle’s letters, and those of his wife Jane, are in the process of being edited and published. It is a massive task, but they are among the finest literary letters of the century and the ...”

“... The night​ before the midterms, I reread The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer’s account of the 1967 March on the Pentagon. ‘Brood on that country who expresses our will,’ Mailer wrote:She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child – no one knows if legitimate – and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen ...”

“... the Kennedys. Wills leads us into the world of Presidential power by the back door. Mimicking a Norman Mailer or a Frank Sinatra, he creates a world of booze and balls and broads and brawls which seems to be as seductive to him as it was to Joe Kennedy and his ambitious sons. The trashy novel in which Wills has – he might say ‘necessarily’ – wrapped ...”

“... along with so many others in the September battle of the Somme – is written as clearly by the white sun on her face as if it had been worked there by a knife in marble. It is winter, and a protective wall behind Pamela hosts espaliered trees, apricot and peach. No shadows are visible, anywhere: the dark runnels of shade cast by the fake dovecote at the ...”

“... shoes – frowning as she walked without hesitation across the room and introduced herself to Norman Mailer, whose book was being launched. At other parties I saw Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Stephen Spender and others, writers whose work I knew but whose faces (like those of most other writers) did not resemble the photographs on their book jackets. I ...”

“... novel about the Allied occupation of Naples, which Heller admired. That gave him pause. Then Norman Mailer’s huge war novel, The Naked and the Dead, stopped him cold. Heller realised immediately that any war novel he was then likely to write would simply disappear in Mailer’s penumbra. Heller later told an interviewer that Mailer was an ...”

“... her fifties to be smitten with Skipper, a gay man eighteen years her junior. A good-looking, rich white Bahamian, Richard Roberts strung her along, joining in her flirtatious games, then swiftly offloaded her. Her sister Hilary told her to ‘grow up’, in other words, to give up.Byrne convinced me that Pym loved and suffered. ‘Pouring out her heart’ in ...”

“... photographed in contemplation and pearls, but Helen Lyons was captured backlit in a diaphanous white lace dress: as risqué and demure as Diana with the sun behind her legs. Muir has brought the original prints together, so one can appreciate the tints and crackles. The early photographs, from small plates, are romantic but not at all stiff. The actress ...”

“... as social body, as spectacle. It would be hard to credit the resulting confusion in the Reagan White House between the personal and the political, the historical and the imaginary, were not the evidence offered by the President and his circle so compelling. Guts and Glory portrays Oliver North, who enacted the anti-Communist part of Reagan. For the ...”

“... In November, Norman Tebbit spoke to the Financial Times of a ‘long revolution’, lasting perhaps twenty years. Nevertheless, he said, ‘when you’ve run through health and education, and had another hard look at the structure of welfare benefits, then it’s difficult to see where the revolution could go on from there ...”

“... in the Conservative camp, on which all their three great warlords agreed – Margaret Thatcher, Norman Tebbit and Lord Young – as did their retinues of ad-men and advisers, was to run a campaign fuelled by fear, a re-run of ‘Don’t let Labour ruin it.’ Fear was a tune which the Prime Minister had practised assiduously over the years: fear of ...”

“... unpalatable truths not really confronted in any of the other books. As the food writer Jill Norman explains in her excellent introduction, people could not have been fed as nutritiously and relatively equitably had ‘food preparation, preservation, storage and transport’ not been industrialised: flesh compressed and tinned in the forms of Spam and ...”

“... Had It So Good, the first volume of his monumental history of Britain since 1956, big guns like Norman Tebbit continued to lambast ‘the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the 1960s’. Three years later, Thatcher blamed the 1960s for ‘“the ...”