“... portraits of those with whom his varied career brought him into contact. He is no Saint-Simon, even of the smallest size; he shows no sign of entering incisively into the motives of those he observes, any more than into his own. And since the ‘few bits of contemporary history’ he ‘knew at first hand’ are treated in so personal a vein, there ...”

“... had been betrayed from within. Orwell, whose own record of events was dismissed by Claude Simon as ‘faked from the very first sentence’, feared that from this time onward history might never again be truthfully written. This was the war in which the Fifth Column was invented (by General Mola, boasting of his secret allies waiting to rise in ...”

“... I struck Exmoor’, whose conversation would have been understood by ‘any man of the period of Simon de Montfort’, although not, alas, by Morton himself. A modicum of realism ensures the text is read as reportage. Here the accompanying photographs help, as does the occasional moment of comic bathos, when indigestion spoils a view, a local dialect is ...”

“... gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster Wallace (b.1962), the previous generation’s experimentalism was as much a way of looking at society as a renovation of novelistic technique. Writers their grouchier teachers viewed as rebarbatively modish or futuristic struck them as fairly ...”

“... the French Ambassador. The patriotic hero, it turned out, had venally conspired with foreigners. David Hume, who had earlier mocked the Sidney cult, found it ‘amusing to observe the general and I may say national rage’. Shortly after the exposure of Sidney, John Wilkes – in the House of Commons, of all places – extolled Cromwell’s ...”

“... the sons of his friends and former colleagues are swimming with the New Labour tide: Edward and David Miliband, sons of his old friend Ralph; Charles Clarke, son of Benn’s former Permanent Secretary, and so on. Some of the most poignant moments come when the Millbank machine tries to whip in its oldest member, reducing him in May 1999 to writing ...”

“... no more idea of how he came up with snail porridge than Michelangelo understood how he produced David (which is not to declare the two creations of equal worth). Peter Conrad enters what he sees as an unfashionable plea for the idea of artistic genius; but genius can be found all over the place. Paul McCartney has a touch of genius, and so do many people ...”

“... this time stole the surname of a classmate – formed a two-tone band called the Executive with David Austin (who would become a lifelong collaborator) and Ridgeley’s brother Paul. Michael was lead vocalist but hadn’t yet found the right style: his attempts at a Jamaican accent fell flat. A fifth member, Andrew Leaver, directed homophobic slurs at James ...”

“... Militant Modernism by Owen Hatherley, One-Dimensional Woman by Nina Power and The Meaning of David Cameron by Richard Seymour, all of which grew from their authors’ blogposts. Such works amounted to ‘a kernel of a whole new left public’, according to another of Fisher’s friends, Jeremy Gilbert, professor of cultural studies at the University of ...”

“... gods. Attempting a Tempest/Macbeth double bill at the Kennedy Center, the 65-year-old protagonist, Simon Axler, ‘the last of the best of the classical American stage actors’, is suddenly abandoned by his talent. No reason is given – there is no reason – and Axler suffers a breakdown, aggravated by his inability to believe even in the sincerity of his ...”

“... them all to be deported to the island in Lord of the Flies, if not actually to share the fate of Simon and Piggy. In fact, of course, they sail home to a scrumptious tea with Mother. It’s hard to imagine that a grown man whose life’s ambition it was to be a great writer could have brought himself to turn out 300 pages of this stuff, let alone 3000. Yet ...”

“... horror, jeopardise, imperil, vulnerable, panic abound. Only pages into The Humbling we hear that Simon Axler, a celebrity actor, is ‘awash with terror and fear’. In each book a close acquaintance of the central character dies unexpectedly in a way quite unconnected with the main events. Roth asks how we can live a full life given the precariousness of ...”

“... a majority in the Parliament in 2011; the mobilising effects of the independence referendum; David Cameron’s decision (presumably well prepared) to use the result as an excuse to push for ‘English votes for English measures’, which allowed the SNP to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. From that moment, as Scottish MPs knew, Labour was finished ...”

“... from the picture then Panofsky’s arch will overbalance and the critic with it. To suggest, as David Solkin does in his conclusion, that Joseph Wright’s An Experiment on the Bird in the Air Pump can ‘offer us a timely word of warning, before we join the chorus of acclamation for those market forces we see marching in apparent triumph across the world ...”

“... Has Labour ever had a decent leader? Has not the conjunction of circumstance always ensured that the right man in the right place at the right time was, ineluctably, the wrong man? Or has there, perhaps, never been a ‘right’ man (or woman): is it in the nature of British working-class politics that those who come to the fore are always those who, as the saying goes, could scarcely organise a piss-up in a brewery? The Edwardian pioneers had no settled leader (the SDP has sound scriptural precedent here): Keir Hardie’s talents were other than those of a Parliamentary chairman; Arthur Henderson was dull; Ramsay MacDonald was both great orator and skilled tactician, though his critics within the Party were numerous well before the First World War broke out ...”