“... and at her best she choreographs them with the power of implication that we admire in Henry James. It is the essence of Brookner to show the kinds of discernment, the sort of noticing, that can cause life to be both wonderful and agonising at the same time. ‘On the way to Bryanston Square,’ we are told in Falling Slowly (1998), ‘she had picked up ...”

“... French writers, but now the novel strikes me as mannered, formless, misguided in its surreal high jinks. Two homosexual bums, glorying in their filth, wander all over the world performing disgusting, sadistic acts. Even here, however, Guibert’s constant inventiveness, his ease and pleasure in writing, his pétillant style are present, as they are in all his ...”

“... so close to the leather-jacketed, blue-jeaned rock idol (the ‘love child of Bob Dylan and James Brown’, as Jon Stewart joked) that we could almost have fist-bumped. To get this close, we journos had to bring specific photo ID (‘driver’s licence or passport’), be searched, undertake to make notes only with pen and notepad, refrain from ...”

“... when I am gone. Proulx has a weakness for silly and/or overexplicit names, such as Theodore Jinks and Sextus Bollard, and the name Breitsprecher, meaning ‘wide speaker’, is only slightly more sophisticated, conveying his eloquence and breadth of perspective, but Proulx nevertheless makes him work as a character rather than the novel’s voice of ...”

“... resignation, there were two further, short-lived secretaries of state for war (Joseph Godber and James Ramsden). Within a year Harold Wilson’s incoming Labour government had abolished the post altogether, amalgamating its duties into the Ministry of Defence. Profumo killed off his job at the same time that he was destroying his own career. What Profumo ...”

“... of the Tory mainstream. They say he was a teenage racist. He says it was all schoolboy high jinks. Given that this was the late 1970s, it is unlikely anyone will be able to prove anything. But we do know where Farage went politically at the end of the 1980s when he decided he could no longer vote Conservative. In the 1989 elections to the European ...”