“... There are two major problems with contemporary British society, according to David Goodhart in The British Dream, and both are primarily caused by immigration. The first problem is economic: the plight of the white working class, especially the young, and the decline of social mobility ...”

“... writing The Girls while she was doing an MFA at Columbia, and sometimes it shows. (On entering a young man’s room: ‘It reeked of what I’d later identify as masturbation, a damp rupture in the air.’) The Guest is succinct and specific: ‘Among other duties, Lori was in charge of Chivas, Simon’s dog. Lori was always trying to train Chivas to wear a ...”

“... hall above the pub and there’s a lot of shouting. Later, as we are getting into the car, Gary, a young man crippled with arthritis, calls out to A. from the snooker hall. She knows him and asks if it was him that was doing the shouting. ‘Yes,’ he says proudly. ‘You shouldn’t.’ ‘Why?’ he asks. ‘Because,’ I put in weakly, ‘it’s a free ...”

“... David Means​ wrote a novel. David Means wrote a novel! Reading the hype around Hystopia – the new novel, the first novel, so far the only novel by the American writer David Means – you have to wonder how much pressure Means resisted from his publishers to forswear the pleasures of the customary gnomic cipher (American Enchiridion, The Accidental Occidental) and just call the book that: David Means Wrote a Novel: A Novel Written by David Means ...”

“... On page 38 of this book appears one of the most remarkable photographs I have seen. It shows a young mother playing an energetic game (tag, perhaps, or pig-in-the-middle) with her three children, two girls and a boy. There are four lively, happy people in the photograph, but only six arms and six legs, for the two girls share a body ...”

“... which can be seen as a sort of compressed version of Guernica – whose dual models in Poussin and David are not painterly in style. Having gone further here than ever before into the post-Renaissance tradition, Picasso soon turned his back on it to work, more characteristically, in a pre-Giottesque tradition. If his painting of the period preceding his late ...”

“... to their new faith was doubtful and they needed to be watched – rightly, it seems, for the young Maimonides wrote a tract urging Jews to choose Islam rather than death, and argued that merit could still be earned by continuing surreptitiously to practise as much of Judaism as was possible. The example of these forced converts moulded the behaviour of ...”

“... in which he died on a makeshift altar; the brazenly Christ-like representation of his dead body by David; the renaming of Montmartre (Martyr’s Mount) as Montmarat; the chant of ‘cor de Jésus, cor de Marat’ as members of the Cordelier club carried his heart through the streets of Paris. What did this imitation really amount to? Did it simply express a ...”

“... Hero’ is the source of Joyce’s title for the forerunner to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ‘Stephen Hero’. Turpin is no hero to James Sharpe, who sets out to cut him down to size, just another ‘callous, brutal and violent’ criminal, an ‘unpleasant thug’, hardly distinguishable from so many others, so that when The Lives of Noted ...”

“... a pot-boy (Bob Gliddery in Our Mutual Friend), seven surgeons, three dance-masters, a reporter (David Copperfield), a tobacconist (Mrs Chivery in Little Dorrit), two fishermen, 32 teachers, four blacksmiths, six undertakers, 45 lawyers and sixteen landladies, several magistrates, a weaver (Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times), an umbrella-maker (Alexander Trott ...”

“... and remnants of the Liberal ascendancy shoulder-to-shoulder with a street-wise generation of young Liberals who cared little for conventional politics. Grimond would catch the Speaker’s eye as the Chamber emptied and speak intelligently to a House which liked the man, but thought his party a joke. Then came Jeremy Thorpe, the flamboyant ...”

“... but for those who care, the shows are like visitations. Last week there was a perfectly tonsured young man in full Berber costume outside the old sorting office in New Oxford Street. He lives in Cockfosters and maintains a blog on male trends. ‘If fashion isn’t everybody’s life then I don’t know who everybody is,’ he said. ‘Well, it’s not the ...”

“... A drunken American historian once lurched over to David Caute at a party and told him: ‘Having read your last novel, or part of it, I’d advise you to give up writing fiction – if you weren’t such a lousy historian.’ Caute, a connoisseur of masochism, tells the story against himself (in Contemporary Novelists, 1976 ...”

“... obsequiously in thrall to Trump. The Democrats have tremendous possible assets in their energetic young left wing – the leadership is good at procedure but not much else. Those younger members need to be instructed that other people are listening to social media. If you want to talk about Jewish money – a hard call anyway – don’t do it in the language ...”

“... Patrick Sellar, the estate manager before Suther, called them ‘barbarous hordes’. William Young, Sellar’s partner as estate factor, called them ‘a set of savages’. The tenants in the western district of Assynt were described by the Sutherlands’ under-manager, an ex-army man called Gunn, as ‘a useless body’, ‘unprincipled in their ...”