“... musings (give them an inch and they’ll take an ell) which do indeed look like improvisations, straight from the stream of consciousness. Here is a Russian at the improvisers’ prize-giving: ‘I get phases like tonight when I’d love to fuck almost every woman I see. Look at that magnificent, fat, blowsy frau dancing with the Pole. God, I’d love to ...”

“... had been written about teatime behaviour: what the world required was sex talk, to set things straight. Unfortunately, the injunction to talk about sex is even less likely to produce full accuracy than the command to silence. Those who dare not speak the name of sex can allude to it, at least; those compelled to sex talk bring the rest of life in only as ...”

“... is no coincidence that the best political styles belong to Enoch Powell, Anthony Wedgwood-Benn and Michael Foot, all men ‘committed to working on and defending the idea of the United Kingdom’. As it happens, Mr Powell himself contributes a piece on ‘The Language of Politics’, in which he concludes that although speeches are briefer and politicians a ...”

“... their heads and complained of the ‘bad Bengali’ – ‘the language does not taste well.’ Michael Datta (Madhusudan Datta, 1824-73), who took the name ‘Michael’ on his conversion to Christianity, was highly regarded as an innovator in Bengali blank verse and for his elevated Miltonic style. But he was never a ...”

“... school uniforms for velvety body stockings, funky short skirts and leopard-print tangas. They head straight for the pub. They get started with a Sambuca challenge, washing down the flaming shots of liquor with Hooch chasers. The novel follows the girls on the razzle around Edinburgh, a tour that takes in several pubs, a police station and the Accident and ...”

“... remember us watching at home was England v. Argentina in the 1998 World Cup – the match in which Michael Owen scored that goal and David Beckham was shown that effigy-birthing red card. It was at McDonald’s that I was introduced to tactical discourse and talk of transfer windows; to the idea that a player being sold by a club for millions of pounds could ...”

“... and envy, superiority and inferiority. Once education ends – at 16, 18 or 22 – we are plunged straight into the adult world – a world also propped up by notions of age and attainment. A career is a hierarchy of jobs, still predominantly a male affair but no less real for that, with a timetable attached so that people know what rank they should have ...”

“... doing a spell of research at Harvard, and Joe welcomes her back with a picnic, which they take straight from Heathrow to the Chilterns. It’s a blustery day for an idyll, but otherwise everything is wonderful. ‘Each leaf seemed to glow with an internal light. We talked about the purity of this colour, the beech leaf in spring, and how looking at it ...”

“... the inability may more properly belong to our culture, since James took a lot of his names straight from the Times – and certainly suffers from no such inability himself. ‘Drawbridge, a butler’, he writes. ‘Blackhead, a civil servant’. ‘Stringham … Roderick … Watkin … Tokenhouse’. But then we might remember that Powell borrowed the ...”

“... of the family is there any blame for Margaret’s obsessive struggles to put the tragic mix-up straight. ‘I did feel that Margaret had treated me differently,’ says Valerie. ‘It was impossible for her to hide the fact I wasn’t naturally hers.’ But she adds: ‘I’d defy anybody who has a cuckoo in the nest, to give that cuckoo the same amount of ...”

“... a job application to the fledgling CIA). The book’s editors, JPat Brown, B.C.D. Lipton and Michael Morisy, founded and run the website MuckRock, where anyone can file a Freedom of Information Act request with the US government, and which is the source of the files in Writers under Surveillance. Files on the living can only be obtained by their subjects ...”

“... queen whose letters and speeches display far more diplomatic evasiveness than empirical straight-talking, whose suitors included Eric of Sweden, Don Carlos of Spain and the Duc d’Alençon, and whose characteristic style of dress was about as plain and godly as that of Lady Gaga. It is equally odd, as Margaret Tudeau-Clayton’s splendid new book ...”

“... not to be confused with a novel of the same title by Anita Brookner). In the earlier book Michael Cullen left working-class Nottingham for the metropolis, fell into the proverbial bad company, and ended up as a convicted gold-smuggler. Now, having been abandoned by his wife after ten years of idleness in the Cambridgeshire village of Upper Mayhem, he ...”

“... memoirs of Hitler’s dog has achieved ironic elevation in Grass’s Hundejahre. Closer to home, Michael Hamburger has devoted himself to bringing German poetry before us and to maintaining its unity over time, space and civil warfare. Where, we must ask ourselves, do the books under review belong in the bushes that have sprung up along Hitler’s posthumous ...”

“... a layer of enigmatic stardust over films I wouldn’t otherwise have been interested in, such as Michael Winner’s Lawman or the Danny La Rue vehicle Our Miss Fred – or, indeed, David Essex’s Stardust. These films were out of reach, but only just out of reach. Forbidden fruit hanging almost low enough to be plucked.I knew that I wanted to read Offbeat ...”