“... to the US was still singling out his term in office as ‘the most fruitful and productive in the post-war years’. This upside to the Nixon picture is much to the fore in Aitken’s adoring biography. It is a strange coming-together: Aitken, the hereditary Tory, born with a large silver spoon in his mouth, and the lower-class Californian Nixon, engaged all ...”

“... with the precocious, mentally sound children who populate many recent novels (Oskar Schell in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, for example). But precocious children cease to be children, and thus to be precocious, whereas Will is fixed in place by his obsessions. It does not help him that many of his trivia, when they are not ...”

“... learned that it needed political support in order to extract concessions from the British state. Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, who played a key role in the negotiations leading to the Good Friday Agreement, makes the point in Talking to Terrorists that Sinn Féin’s growing electoral mandate helped the British government to argue the case for a ...”

“... one is inadvertently reminded of television’s ‘Just Say No’ anti-drugs ads. Disillusioned post-war Movement writers were always delighted to tell their more exotic predecessors where they could go and shove it, and as a reviewer in the late Forties and early Fifties Enright could be every bit as ferocious as ‘ape-neck Amis’ and the rest. His ...”

“... the public before the public can be reached. Henry Fielding evidently revised the first version of Jonathan Wild for his collected Works, taking out the Lucianic chapter of Mrs Heartfree’s adventures, in which she and her shipwrecked party capture the Phoenix and attempt to eat it. I admire that chapter, and think it should be reinstated in current ...”

“... and does not therefore deal with the problem of Eritrea and Ethiopia’s acquisition of it; the post-war performance of Haile Selassie’s government; the emergence of the Emperor as the patron of anti-imperialism and of Addis Ababa as the permanent seat of the Organisation of African Unity; the long struggle against the Eritreans and the Somalis; the ...”

“... however, they were paramount. Here they eclipsed outlaw heroes of folk tradition – Dick Turpin, Jonathan Wild, Dick Sheppard – and usurped the leadership of the police in the fight against delinquency and disorder. The prolific Stephen Knight has calculated that Sherlock Holmes had at least 13 predecessors, some of them women. Most were quickly ...”

“... references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster Wallace (b.1962), the previous generation’s experimentalism was as much a way of looking at society as a renovation of novelistic technique. Writers their grouchier teachers viewed as rebarbatively modish or futuristic ...”

“... no archives from me period to compare with those of three centuries later so cunningly used by Jonathan Spence to construct his Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K’ang-hsi. If we had to judge Khubilai on the basis of his appearance in later Chinese historical writings we might never be tempted to read a full biography of him at all. Many of them cheat ...”

“... from the German people. It can be argued that this merely proves that Germans did not object to a post-liberal apartheid for Jews, only to displays of public disorder and vandalism. On the other hand, it might mean that many, possibly most, Germans, while indifferent to the Jews’ second-class citizenship, drew a line at a certain level of ...”

“... the interests of its ‘customers’ (as we say nowadays) is a question central to his book. Post-Restoration Londoners, he observes, got into a great lather over crime and criminals. They felt they were in the middle of what would now be called a ‘crime-wave’, endangering life and limb, persons and possessions. By the early 18th century all the talk ...”

“... venerated alongside Alexander Pope, who held that ‘Most Women have no Characters at all,’ or Jonathan Swift, who, at the conclusion of that catalogue of excremental horrors ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’, has his speaker remark: ‘Should I the Queen of Love refuse,/Because she rose from stinking Ooze?’ Or even Samuel Johnson. If women’s writing ...”

“... public in recent months by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor. On 29 August, the Washington Post published excerpts from the annual budget for all national intelligence programmes, agency by agency, provided by Snowden. In consultation with the Obama administration, the newspaper chose to publish only a slim portion of the 178-page document, which has a ...”

“... of this has changed in our present? It is now said with tedious regularity that we live in a ‘post-truth’ age which radically differs from anything that came before. Sages and hacks alike grumble that postmodernism has formed a toxic alliance with online disinformation to dissolve the secure foundations on which truth, supposedly, once rested.These ...”

“... Ayatollah Montazeri seemed to have been Khomeini’s (and Khomeini’s son’s) favourite for the post, a dispute about his ability to continue the old revolutionary’s policies arose a few years ago. In an article on the present crisis that appeared in the New York Review of Books (15 January) Shaul Bakhash reported on the increased presence in Teheran of ...”