“... convincing motive’, ‘try to surprise the reader at the end, but always play fair’ – could be a list of everything that was deliberately missing from Moshfegh’s previous books, which are populated by flat, chronically miserable characters who repeat the same self-defeating and often viscerally revolting actions ...”

“... the bonxie swipes. They nest on open ground; stray too close, and the bonxie will drive you away by flying straight at your head. (Once, on North Rona, my friend Stuart and I were walking along when a bonxie took exception to us. It came in fast, misjudged its height and walloped Stuart so hard it burst his eardrum.)I could see the Bass on the horizon on the ...”

“... Breton to explore a variety of practices in multiple locales. This ambitious show, co-curated by Matthew Gale of Tate Modern and Stephanie D’Alessandro of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (where it appeared last autumn), is filled to the brim with paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, films and documents from an extraordinary array of ...”

“... as columnists speculate about whether he will run for a second term in 2024, at the age of 81, or be replaced by a pundit’s dream ticket of Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg. The spectre of Trump remains, at least in the obsessive minds of those who believe the vandalism done to the Capitol on 6 January was a catastrophe ...”

“... voices and then subsuming them all under the breezy heading of ‘new writing’. Diversity has to be on show, because we all know that diversity is good for literary culture, but at the same time nobody must step so far out of line that the sense of community is spoiled. Any areas of contrast between the individual contributions are counterbalanced ...”

“... that cliché awards them; but then one of the suggestions of this film is that clichés have to be worked with, that there is no way round them, and (at present) no place beyond. The time is the summer of 1977, the year of the Queen’s Jubilee, but the real celebration is here, every Saturday night: a festival of plurality. The film has two later echoes of ...”

“... at the Crown Hotel, Everleigh, where he had been staying for five days at a house party hosted by J.M. Keynes. The cause of Rupert’s distress was the departure that day of Noel Olivier, to go climbing in Switzerland. Her elder sister Brynhild had left with her, off to climb in Wales with Hugh Popham, to whom she had just become engaged. Moping in his ...”

“... his folly (and must underwrite much of its cost)’. It is precisely that conflict that ought to be visible in the Odyssey, the poem not of war, but of the aftermath of war. Yet, despite the Odyssey’s ‘primitive vestiges’, despite the ‘repressed material, old and interesting’, that comes ‘struggling out’, the women are not given the voice to ...”

“... Shop.’ Most County grounds have an establishment like this, where anything that can reasonably be sold at a profit – papers, sweets, magazines, cricket shirts, canned drinks, books – is stocked. Mrs Eaton’s shop, a Portakabin located at the back of the terracing in the forecourt to the ground, has all this and more. In one corner is her coffee ...”

“... Each new book by Jeanette Winterson is said to be poorer than its predecessor; she is like a bibliographer’s definition of nostalgia. As her novels become more ghostly, so they give off a stronger vapour of self-promotion. Her last, Written On The Body, announced on its cover that it had ‘fused mathematical exactness and poetic intensity and made language new ...”

“... The United States has been gripped by a campaign to drive violence from television. Some blame violent images for violent acts; others insist that the images themselves do violence. Senators bemoan television brutality, a national debate on the pros and cons of censorship takes centre stage for a time – displaced by other violent attention-getters like Lorena and John Wayne Bobbitt, Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, Singapore’s caning sentence to punish an American teenager, the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ Congressional proposal to jail for life those convicted of three violent crimes (a category that includes any drug-related offence and the use of imitation guns) – but nothing will change ...”

“... image of President Ronald Reagan as a game but fuddled movie actor is an image so stale as to be rebarbative. It is the standby of the weary cartoonist, the flagging gag-writer and the composer of hackneyed captions. It’s been a boast of mine, during some years of writing from Washington, that I have never lampooned the old boy as a Wild West ham, an ...”

“... or even of the editor, if it reminds one of Dr Johnson’s objection to the yoking together by violence of heterogeneous ideas. Comparative Criticism is a product of comparative literature, the first chair of which was created for Francesco De Sanctis in Naples in 1871 in recognition of his services to literary history and the cause of the ...”

“... a wife and mother, looms large, the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. The introduction is written by Jane Ewart-Biggs. Lady Ewart-Biggs speaks for those throughout the country who listened with growing dismay to the debate in Parliament on 3 April 1982 which culminated in the despatch of the Task Force with all-party support. Those people thought in terms of ...”

“... obscene partly because fact and fiction have merged: Blunt, Bill Haydon, Smiley, Peter Wright seem by now all at the same distance. This obsession with espionage is that of investigators, of unmaskers. Its motives even with regard to secrecy are complex. It is obvious that the need to unmask and then unmask again assorted Cambridge spies is concerned with more ...”