“... In this, her work occasionally recalls Salinger’s later stories and, among practising writers, George Saunders and Thomas Pynchon.Barker’s explorations have taken her to 19th-century India and a post-metaphysical future. Yet British banality has retained its allure, and its uses. Her work is full of people called things like Bill and Jim. Martin ...”

“... social justice, non-violence and peace, often putting their bodies on the line’. In his preface George Saunders, though he stays in his corner by focusing mostly on the fiction, suggests that reading Paley will spark ‘a revived concern for other people’s suffering’ and ends by recommending her work to anyone ‘looking for a more full-hearted way ...”

“... glare of summer, trying to avoid the ‘garbage, dung, stench and slander’ of the place, as George Seferis described it, ‘the pestering flies, the beggars, the street salesmen who pushed things in their faces … the yelling, the hooting, the screeching brakes, the clanging of tram-cars and howl of tram-horns’. Lawrence Durrell, who had been living ...”

“... narrators used a jumbled, malaprop French that served as a vehicle for pathos as well as humour. (George Saunders might be the best current analogue in English.) Gary let his own publisher in on the secret but the rest of the firm was kept in the dark. Raymond Queneau, passing Ajar’s first novel to a Gallimard subsidiary for publication, observed that ...”

“... wander onto the wrong side of the law, and get in trouble with ‘the Bill’. Indeed, both George Cole and Dennis Waterman in their Minder roles are now thought suitable characters to help encourage young people to stay off drugs in a series of commercials sponsored by the DHSS. The thought of dear old Arthur ending up inside for some of his misdeeds ...”

“... it is no longer enough either to blame totalitarianism or to demonise the Truman doctrine and George Kennan’s strategy of ‘containment’. More objectionable still are the parallels drawn by Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice between the Cold War democratisation of West Germany and Japan and today’s project of bringing democracy to the Middle ...”

“... or her – place. A lovely thing. 31 December. Because some 25 years ago The Madness of King George was nominated for an Oscar, around Christmas we generally get a clutch of DVDs soliciting votes for the next year’s awards. Today it’s Call Me by Your Name, which has been much lauded, so much so that when we come to watch it this rather gets in the ...”

“... after church on Sunday, that my father was anything other than a ‘from here’ person. Donald Saunders looked the same and sounded the same as the other guests who sipped Tio Pepe (medium or dry) from Lilliputian glasses and did small talk while Alexander and I handed around the shiny peanuts (bald, like the vicar) after first shovelling out fistfuls for ...”

“... But this is in comparison with the clichéridden public pronouncements he was given to making: George Ball, who twice campaigned against him, has written of ‘a plodding fivestar general uttering pedestrian language written by some journalistic hack with all the grace of a gun-carriage being hauled across cobblestones’. It appears from the diaries that ...”

“... Chukovsky and others. It was a founding text of the Kulturkampf, as important in its way as George Kennan’s Long Telegram (also written in 1946) was to the shaping of the political Cold War. In a letter accompanying the report, Berlin requested that it be treated as ‘confidential’ because of ‘the well-known consequences to the possible sources ...”

“... On​ 11 December, the director of public prosecutions, Alison Saunders, announced that all outstanding cases against Mirror Group journalists for phone hacking would be dropped, and that no corporate case would be brought against Rupert Murdoch’s News UK for hacking or perverting the course of justice. It was Christmas come early on Fleet Street, but that isn’t the way the papers chose to tell it ...”

“... was probably acquired from a Cockney immigration officer), he was a subject of King George V, and therefore, as he spent a lifetime explaining to interviewers, not a refugee. ‘After the excitements of Berlin, Britain was inevitably a comedown,’ Hobsbawm remembered. ‘Nothing in London had the emotional charge of those ...”

“... into a Wasp himself, educated at Groton and Yale, a member of exclusive clubs, and named Arthur Saunders Wolff III. He was often drunk. His father was fed up with him and kept him short of money, but as he was oldish, inheritance did not seem too far off. Duke borrowed from friends, charged to his mother’s account, and lived reluctantly though luxuriously ...”

“... executor to deflect most of the money away from the obvious political uses that had been intended. George Bernard Shaw’s indignant account of a subsequent meeting of the Fabian executive, at which Webb ‘hinted that the bequest had been left to him to dispose of as he thought fit, and that the executive had nothing to do with it’, was not just Shavian ...”

“... desire to explore the situations and character dispositions that make laughter happen. French and Saunders, whose range, from shared flat to Hollywood burlesque, owes much to Eric and Ernie, are to some extent an exception. Others, like Reeves and Mortimer, who are the inheritors of the spirit, if not the style, of Morecambe and Wise carry the double act into ...”