“... four days (having earlier conceived the plot during a restless night in Tokyo, when he was visited by a shimmering vision of Gertrude Lawrence). Four days to write a classic comedy was good going, but he had already written Hay Fever in three. In 1941, when hard up, he withdrew to the Italianate folly of Portmeirion in Wales (presumably festooned in barbed ...”

“... now close to perfection. To make representations look deceptively real, and to remain untroubled by considerations of what ‘real’ could possibly mean, was the aim of the artist, and the function of the critic was simply to admire the technical accomplishments that made the illusion credible. You could also express an admiring or even a disgusted interest ...”

“... It is easy to conjure up landscapes of the past peopled by holy fools, and to suppose that medieval times were full of simpleton jesters, and boy bishops leading rites of inversion and showing how all sinners were equal in God’s eyes. It is equally easy to imagine a subsequent darkening of the plain – the old Christian reverence for simplicity yielding to the carceral project of modernity, Foucault’s great confinement ...”

“... that ‘the educational establishment are gnawing away at this Bill like rats in a cellar.’ By the simple process of locking us all in a cellar, the Government has produced unity between people who would not normally have agreed with each other in a thousand years. Max Beloff, speaking in the House of Lords, once exclaimed in grief: ‘I agree with ...”

“... world’, claims he can help prevent such collapses, a view shared (for varying periods of time) by Andre Agassi, Boris Becker, Monica Seles, Mary Pierce, Jim Courier, Anna Kournikova and Mark Philippousis, among others. Exactly how, though, on the evidence of this as-told-to memoir, remains a mystery. Who needs the world’s best tennis coach to ...”

“... There are serious works that masquerade as coffee-table books, and Venetian Villas by Michelangelo Muraro is one of them. Large and elegantly packaged, it contains over four hundred colour plates on a topic of perennial fascination, the villa in the Veneto: but it would be wrong to dismiss it as just another recycling of familiar images ...”

“... its future. The analogy that fits is Rome under Nero. The retribution that is surely coming will be terrible to behold. The tale is told in the form of a biography of one of the minor players. Roy Cohn was a personification, but not a creator, of the rot that has spread through the élite of American life since World War Two. He was Jewish, son of a New York ...”

“... banished for ever. It was also taken for granted that unemployment on that scale would not again be politically tolerable. Yet here we are with a government which succeeded in getting itself re-elected yet again with a rate of unemployment which, even if on a downward trend, was still running at over three million. And less of a fuss, if anything, was being ...”

“... among the reporters covering his heavyweight title fight with Floyd Patterson in 1962. Intimidated by Listen’s criminal record and connections with organised crime, the press took his sullenness for the recalcitrance of an underworld brawler. The former heavyweight champion is no less threatening in Thom Jones’s two previous collections of short ...”

“... pubs in the London area were named ‘The Three Johns’ – Wilkes and Horne were assisted by a lawyer, John Glynn – and at least one, in Islington, still bears the name today. Horne now became a full-time politician, though he accepted that his clerical status debarred him from elective office. He was a leading figure in the Bill of Rights ...”

“... At 17 I was (let me be bold, let me put it on record) gorgeous, and gorgeous in exactly the way a person was supposed to be in 1964. Thin as a leaf, a Biba size eight, hips that held hipsters perfectly in place, and legs that were perfectly designed for emerging from skirts that were little more than a pelmet ...”

“... for the transformation are technically at hand although their rational application is prevented by the existing organisation of the forces of production. And in this sense, I believe, we can today actually speak of an end to utopia.’ Combining a faith in technology with the confidence that only the wrong mode of production stands in the way of its fully ...”

“... storytellers of all nations improvise a fictional narrative in accordance with a theme chosen by the judges. The odd thing is that D.M. Thomas is not a storyteller. Swallow is the sort of book that attracts descriptions like ‘metafiction’, ‘fabulation’ and ‘self-referential’ – words that came into vogue at the same time as ...”

“... It is delightful and unexpected to open a book by a public Eminence to find the blue wings of Morpho cypris spread out before one. Then a few pages later there is the green and orange of Ornithoptera paradisea. This is, however, not a work of lepidopterology, except in the sense that it records that the author was ‘born into a family in which lepidopterology was a ruling passion ...”

“... after 1789. In the hundred years after 1750, Britain’s social fabric was tried and tormented by the strains of unprecedented population growth and pioneering economic change. Add to this the world’s most sophisticated press network, a corrupt and supposedly amorphous state structure, and the impact and example of the American and French ...”