“... identity is characterised not by imperial nostalgia, as such commentators as Fintan O’Toole and Anthony Barnett have suggested, but by a more inchoate sense of communal ‘loss’. Loss of what? ‘One part of the Englishman’s burden of the three Celtic statelets was to eschew a patriotism that was other than British, or a flag that was other than the ...”

“... physical urges are hard to combat,’ he says. That much is nothing new: Jesus and St Anthony knew it very well. But Atkins’s conclusion is staunchly democratic: ‘Fighting the scale armed only with willpower and determination works, at best, for only five low-fat dieters out of a hundred.’ If, however, we use the best nutritional science, we ...”

“... theory were already creating a self-contained alternative political thought space conducive to the cross-fertilisation of conspiracist ideas. Covid-19 and government efforts to control it – an extreme event, accompanied by what can seem baffling and intrusive restrictions – appear, in the conspiracist mind, as the most open moves yet by a secret group of ...”

“... of the church’. For the updated view, she links to a recent book by another vicar, Justin Lewis-Anthony, with the unbeatable title If You Meet George Herbert on the Road, Kill Him: Radically Rethinking Priestly Ministry. Both these ministers are products of a Church of England that has adapted to an England in which religious freedom is a given. Churches ...”

“... and Mr Johnson has them ‘crossing into Lebanon’. In the same way, no doubt, did the Russians cross into Afghanistan and the Germans enter Poland. The little matter of the entry into Lebanon costing some twenty-five thousand lives is discreetly omitted. In 1982 Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment of Beirut caused heavy civilian casualties. Yet for an ...”

“... ego. The most famous and successful venture in homosexual ventriloquism by a novelist is still Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers. I had doubts about the book when it came out in 1980, disliking the easy equation of homosexuality with cowardliness, even though this was an equation accepted by many homosexuals of the generation of Burgess’s octogenarian ...”

“... lies not least with the actors: Anne Heche and Vince Vaughn are no match for Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins. Haneke’s American remake of Funny Games, even closer to the original movie in story and shot arrangement, is also inferior, and again the actors are a primary reason. The villains aren’t quite right in their social demeanour: Funny Games is a ...”

“... by means of the divine manipulation of threads, comes right up to the edge of comedy but doesn’t cross over. Comedy offers release, and there is to be no release for Jay Justus and his siblings, and none for the reader. This is a repetitive book, and some of the redundancy could have been editorially trimmed – the phrase ‘Mother Land’ loses all force ...”

“... Penelope Mortimer arrived to interview him for the Observer magazine in 1978, she could barely cross the threshold. Dunsmuir calmly explained that ‘the front door had been off its hinges for some time and it was difficult to get things fixed.’ Graham’s living conditions were a satire on the whole idea of having a home or feeling at home: when the ...”

“... The defence did not think so. Lawson told the jury: ‘If I’d had that man in the box to cross-examine, then we would have seen the truth.’ Armstrong’s absence was undoubtedly a telling point against the Crown. ‘Considerable efforts,’ Bevan said, ‘were made on the part of the Crown to get assistance from Patrick ...”

“... I suppose I thought, feeling foolish that I’d been taken for a ride (or taken her for one) and cross that I’d fared worse than if I’d never lifted a finger, these mixed feelings to be the invariable aftermath of any transaction involving Miss Shepherd. One seldom was able to do her a good turn without some thoughts of strangulation. It must have been a ...”

“... what amounts to an individualised newspaper. I would be entirely happy to pay to subscribe to Anthony Lane on movies in the New Yorker, and Patricia Wells on restaurants in the Herald Tribune, and Larry Elliott on economics in the Guardian, and David Pogue on technology in the New York Times, and I also want to feel free to read anything else which ...”

“... quarter-century, for those with access to them, have held the progression of Aids in check. Dr Anthony Fauci’s stock rises and falls over the course of the book; he is seen by at least one contributor as preoccupied with his own glory. As director of the National Institutes of Health he was willing to respond to phone calls and to have meetings with ...”

“... tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the Fitzwilliam. I take in a chance selection of pictures, dictated by which happen to be in range of available banquettes, and in particular the Van Dyck portrait of Archbishop Laud. It’s hung beside one of his voluptuous court ...”

“... public, and a recognised ‘act’. In 1978, Berlin wrote a private letter to the psychiatrist Anthony Storr, wondering why he, a beloved only child, should still be visited with the feeling that his many attainments were ‘of very little or of no value’. This takes us some way beyond the pose of false modesty, but nowhere near as far as self-hatred.I ...”