“... debatable. It’s a shocking story, with one of the victims having been battered almost to death. David Cameron is quick to move in and claim the crime is evidence of ‘a broken society’, conveniently ignoring the fact that Edlington, the village in question, is smack in the middle of what was a mining community, a society systematically broken by Mrs ...”

“... surrogacy, renting out your time and your body to produce a baby, is just another job: not a nice job, not stable or easy or high-status, but something some women feel they have to do because they and the people who depend on them need the money. The parallel isn’t perfect, as she acknowledges – ‘gestation and sexual services only have so much in ...”

“... whole seem to care, what is being kept from us. That is rather special; and a major factor, claims David Vincent in this path-breaking book, in our governance. It can have ludicrous effects. One was the refusal to acknowledge that we had any ‘secret services’: until recently, MI5 and MI6 had no official existence. Questions about them in Parliament were ...”

“... strike hair. A queer Pan with italicised attitude, Rimbaud gets the Leonardo DiCaprio film and David Wojnarowicz mask. All Baudelaire’s best-known head shots are from his twilight years: grouchy, standoffish, a dissipated cleric. Ghosting everyone, ghosting poetry itself, Rimbaud stops writing aged nineteen and disappears like a magician’s ...”

“... the house in his wheelchair. As they drive off, Clune says: ‘His wheelchair did look real nice, though. It was brand new, practically. It had the red leather armrests. I bet he wouldn’t feel too bad if he did have to wheel himself to the store.’ He also writes about his theory of addiction, in which the colour white takes on several meanings. As ...”

“... sympathetic to the manager, as many were not – many were his unscrupulous enemies. For David Lacey of the Guardian Gascoigne had a tendency to give away the ball and to be a clown. It was not surprising that his place in the national team remained less than assured. On the eve of the tournament Kenny Dalglish, the Liverpool manager, declared on ...”

“... copulate with their eyes shut, whether or not they think of England, and sometimes have a nice time, even so, which suggests that the mantlepiece, though mute, might have its own opinions on what makes a good stoke. Then again, if having sex with an ugly woman sent George III mad, the neurasthenia to which married women of the 18th and 19th centuries ...”

“... one of several umbrellas, is adjusting the noose. Powell’s co-conspirators, George Atzerodt and David Herold, still have their heads free: their expressions – private reckoning, a kind of baffled fear – are legible on their faces. A large man in a white coat and Panama hat is fussing round them, carrying with him the incongruous atmosphere of a summer ...”

“... The connectionist approach is different. In 1986, the psychologists James McClelland and David Rumelhart proposed a network that learns verbs by building associative links between stems and their past tense forms. The network is ‘trained’ by repeated exposure to such pairs, without any appeal to rules or innate knowledge. Pinker published a ...”

“... of emotion,’ Vernon recalls of his friendship with Jesus. ‘My buddy, who once did the best David Letterman impression you ever saw, has been abducted by glandular acids.’ (Compare Richard Tull’s lament in The Information that, at 45, he no longer ‘snags on the DNA’. Amis is being literary; but Vernon is not supposed to be a writer.) For all the ...”

“... Thatcher. Work is the only escape, which fortunately moves along a little.9 May. My birthday. A nice woman in a leopardskin coat who always speaks wishes me a happy birthday. I say that I wish it was. ‘Why? What’s happened?’ ‘Last Thursday. The election.’ ‘Oh, you don’t want to worry about that. They’re all the same.’ At which point (we ...”

“... thanks to propaganda campaigns spearheaded by Bullingdon Club toffs like Boris Johnson and David Cameron, underwent significant revision. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the horse path alongside the Regent’s Canal was mud, and forbidden to pedestrians and cyclists alike, I rode to my gardening job in Limehouse on a market wreck bought for ...”

“... Water Eaton were of ‘good working-class stock, but unintelligent. The sort of people who are nice to you when you come canvassing, but who will not buy a copy of the Daily Worker as they “already get the Herald, thank you very much.”’ Later a great mythologiser of her own social status, implying an ‘Anglo-Irish’ ascendancy background which she ...”

“... There were other papers, sometimes cheap and nasty; and the most famous paper of all had been nice to Hitler at the time of Munich. But the press was part of the fabric of a free society. It was held in trust for us all. The truth was rather different. Scott had acquired the Manchester Guardian in 1907 and henceforth it was ‘carried on as a public ...”

“... tough keeping track of all the debutantes promenading into print and creating a stir: Donna Tartt, David Leavitt, Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Nancy Lemann, Susan Minot, Mary Robison, Anderson Ferrell – a cast of dozens. Many of those rookies trained at the literary dojo of the author, editor, creative writing teacher and guru-mentor-mindgamer ...”