“... tragic dignity to a bad marriage between frivolous people fails to prevent the acknowledgment that Dick Diver is ‘no longer a serious man’. For all that Rush’s characters are unusually literate, his prose is almost entirely unlyrical, even antipoetic. In Mortals Ray Finch’s thoughts borrow from Yeats without Rush ceasing to observe their stumbling ...”

“... involvement in Britain’s 5G network, and the bombardiers of Brexit – Iain Duncan Smith, David Davis, Liam Fox et al – are furious too. The industry points out that Huawei kit has already been installed in dozens of cities across the UK and to a more sophisticated standard than the US can currently provide. Ripping it all out would cost billions and ...”

“... farm, where they were anally penetrated, each in turn, by a stallion they had nicknamed Big Dick, actual name Strut. The stallion mounted and penetrated Pinyan, perforating his sigmoid colon; doctors later ruled the cause of death as acute peritonitis. (The erect penis of a stallion is on average between two and two and a half feet long.) A ...”

“... jocular, know-your-place remarks of the sort made by Michael Fallon to Andrea Leadsom, or by David Davis of Diane Abbott. In the 1979 general election, which brought the Conservatives to power under Margaret Thatcher – something Harman describes as an ‘excruciating blow’ – 19 women were elected, the lowest postwar figure aside from the 17 elected in ...”

“... Parker, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. Their music embodied the promise of another country, one that was true to its professed ideals. Its very existence seemed miraculous. A vernacular music, created by the descendants of slaves, had evolved into the ...”

“... it’s time to get the battery checked. What is to be done? The first thing to do is to admit that Dick Cheney is right. ‘Conservation may be a personal virtue,’ he said in 2001, ‘but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.’ Rephrase that sentence to state that conservation is indeed a personal virtue, and both halves of ...”

“... this Hollywood dreck, Ben?’ Roth wanted to know, ‘And why are you gay men so beguiled by Bette Davis?’ Yeah, Ben, what gives? Roth: ‘You don’t look twice at Ava Gardner, who was, to put it mildly, more attractive. She had an enduring sexiness, even in London. In the 1980s. When I had her.’ When I had her: how the phrase just rolls off the ...”

“... have a clue how to behave, and their language proves it. All those words for bum and fanny and dick she knows because there is no distinction between the private world of the family and the world outside – after all, the Lesur family home is a public bar. When she reads Balzac’s Père Goriot she learns that proper families have separate spaces. Even ...”