“... be chaired by Anita Hill (who brought charges of harassment against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991), is more effective. In the past few months, our understanding of what constitutes sexual harassment has been put under considerable strain. For all the remonstrations of the accused – ‘You’re making a fuss about nothing’; ‘Things were ...”

“... a first draft of The Idiot in the early 2000s, publishing it only in 2017 – by which point Donald Trump, a familiar figure from my youth, was somehow in charge of the United States, and Roe was under serious threat, and I, on the eve of my fortieth birthday, was going around the country promoting a ‘debut novel’ about a painful crush I had had when ...”

“... sent to expedite the flight of Sahrawi refugees into Algeria.In​ 2020 the lame duck president Donald Trump added Morocco to the list of Arab states – Bahrain, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates – he had persuaded to normalise relations with Israel. It’s been many years since the taboo against ‘normalisation’ was actually observed in the ...”

“... and some will be justly winnowed. We could get down to winnowing right away. There’s an essay by Donald Justice on ‘Oblivion’, about how reputations disappear. And the subject has a lot of pathos, in that he talks about lives spent devoted to creative objectives with all that that involves; and yet some of those so devoted are doomed to be, at best, of ...”

“... that she would never be a mother. On this, female-to-male transsexuals have gone further. In 2007, Thomas Beatie, having retained his female reproductive organs on transition, gave birth to triplets through artificial insemination. They died, but he has since given birth to three children. But for Stryker, mutilation is at once a badge of honour and a counter ...”

“... to a prominent Lobby figure, had ‘displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns’. Thomas Dine, the head of AIPAC at the time, explained what happened: ‘All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the American politicians – those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire – got the ...”

“... who lost to Reform, beaten by Barry Elliott, a ‘striking individual’, as Vladimir Putin called Donald Trump. She still sits on the town council, a body with few powers; it has also fallen to Reform. She told me how horrified she’d been during the last campaign at the hostility provoked by the mere mention of Keir Starmer’s name, or the sight of a ...”