“... I am going to start asking them what they think about the war, I am told it is time to leave by a keen young woman officer who assured me earlier that she loves the Guardian’s coverage of Iraq. The Americans let their soldiers speak their mind. The British would rather theirs didn’t.23 February. The hotel has a fast internet connection. It takes about a ...”

“... often from North London to Sloane Square, walking away from the Royal Court Theatre, rounding Peter Jones on Symons Street and turning up towards Cadogan Square. On entering the house, you rose in a coffin-like lift to the top and walked down to the first half-landing, where the door of her place would be open. Inside, if it was summer, you could browse ...”

“... King’s Road since the previous year; and while there were, as ever, socially ambitious people keen to meet aristocrats there were also, as the much discussed ‘Princess Margaret set’ demonstrated, members of the upper classes happy to meet at least the more talented and glamorous members of the lower orders. Yet Thompson fills in this background to ...”

“... talking, about speech I mean, he’s actually not so very good at dialogue (not when you think of Peter McDougall or Roddy Doyle). It’s the way people talk to themselves that he gets so brilliantly, so matchlessly. While the peripheral characters in his stories often exchange words in a pretty featureless manner, his central characters have always had a ...”

“... Another, more recent antecedent of which Salaman seems to be aware is that of the Australian Peter Carey’s very comparable Bliss (1981), whose ad-man hero Harry Joy revives at the start after being clinically dead for nine minutes, and returns, winded, to his former way of life, deprived of his former breezy ‘optimism’, even suspecting that he is ...”

“... is no education and too little water. But ‘the political boys’, as the guards call them, are keen to point out the legality of their activities from their point of view. The Afghan government, for reasons nobody understands, aims to move the children to a new site near Sarposa prison, a Taliban-rich area where adult inmates once sewed up their mouths in ...”

“... that no one would suspect that the pope had left the building. At the church of SS Marcellin and Peter, the pope’s coach was met by the Bavarian ambassador, Count Karl von Spaur, who was clutching a pistol in his right hand, in case they were challenged. The fugitive was bustled into a small open carriage and driven out of the city, his face obscured by ...”

“... where they first got going. He has a colourful cast of characters – like the bouffant-haired Peter Brimelow, who started out as a fairly standard Thatcherite in the UK and ended up in the US as a white supremacist, or Murray Rothbard, who went from paleolibertarianism to promoting David Duke and Holocaust denial – but after a while they are hard to ...”

“... Christ is a portrait of none other than Ernest Renan, Apostolos-Cappadona writes. She shows a keen interest in depictions of Mary Magdalene by women artists, but they rarely diverge from conventional iconography (indeed Artemisia Gentileschi surpasses her male counterparts in swooning ecstasy). This changes only in the present day: Kiki Smith’s hirsute ...”

“... about the need to revive local government and why he is mistrustful of devolution and keen on referenda only if a constitutional commission (‘consisting of senior members of both Houses of Parliament and possibly judges and influential people drawn from across the spectrum of society’) gets to make sure ‘the issue is put in the right ...”

“... to, Monty Johnstone’s is a name that recurs, along with the philosopher Hyman (Hymie) Levy, Peter Fryer the journalist, and Brian Pearce, well known today as a translator of historical works from French and Russian. Levy she remembers as a very persuasive public speaker, whose Edinburgh accent ‘made everything sound reasonable’. Her observation post ...”

“... which might be called, say, inexplicable human powers – and that Freud, in his view, was too keen to disavow. If the aim of a system is to create an outside where you can put the things you don’t want, then we have to look at what a system (or a person) disposes of – its rubbish – to understand it; to get a picture of how it sees itself and wants ...”

“... week of the American premiere of The Rake’s Progress – one finds that the boon-companions were Peter Bartok, Edmund Wilson, Fritz Reiner, Rudolph Bing, Alma Mahler-Werfel, Paco Lagerstrom, Auden, Kallman, Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. Stravinsky was, however, saddled at this time as on several occasions with the chaotic if aristocratic poet Edward James ...”

“... him, he was in his 78th year and had recently suffered a mild stroke, although he was still very keen. Something like a Schubert string quartet was being broadcast over BBC radio while he was upstairs doing washing one morning when all of a sudden he was at the top of the stairs screaming savagely at the players: ‘You’re playing it too bloody fast!’ A ...”

“... well. While some increase in luxury was an inevitable concomitant of commercial progress, Dr Peter Kürn wrote in 1792, when the sum of sensual pleasures surpasses the sum of more noble and more useful pursuits, when natural needs can no longer be distinguished from the crowd of imagined and fantastic ones, when reason does not choose, but only ...”