“... Brandt changed the way the English look at the English. He was cosmopolitan. His disciple, Tony Ray-Jones, wasn’t. He allowed his once provincial eye to be led by Brandt. Ray-Jones may have shared his subjects with Donald McGill or Ken Russell but his compositions of simultaneous actions by competing players are stolen from a different world.They are ...”

“... of a pretty girl. She might be a Kurd, but maybe not, the report does not say. Then there is a white girl, who could be from anywhere between Moscow and San Francisco; a black boy, probably from Africa, possibly Birmingham; a Malay or Indonesian boy; another boy who I think is South American, but don’t hold me to it, he could be an Arab; and a girl I can ...”

“... desperately inauthentic sensation. The State of the Union speech. The New Hampshire primary. The White House Easter egg roll. The presentation of the Presidential Thanksgiving turkey (which even comes complete with its own self-satirising pun). I would add the Nobel Prizes though not, oddly enough, the Booker ones. Nothing that has to be done every year ...”

“... of Z Cars, found allies in the Wednesday Play’s script editor and producer, Roger Smith and Tony Garnett. ‘What we realised,’ Loach said, ‘was that social democrats and Labour politicians were simply acting on behalf of the ruling class, protecting the interests of capital.’ No sooner had he identified a politically receptive audience than he ...”

“... and the war in Kosovo that were manifestly being driven principally from 10 Downing Street and the White House. He also had to sit tight and accept a great many heavy-handed attempts to impose the will of Number 10 on local Labour organisations – the Welsh Assembly and the London mayoral contest were notable examples. Well before the 2001 election, John ...”

“... as much as it does Le Pen. For the left, Macron isn’t just a French version of Bill Clinton or Tony Blair – a supposedly progressive politician who extols the free market and has sold out to big business. He also conjures up memories of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who launched his 1851 coup by papering Paris with posters announcing: ‘I have dissolved ...”

“... I heard that the family of an American soldier killed in Iraq receives $12,000. I heard that the White House had deleted the chapter on Iraq from the annual Economic Report of the President, on the grounds that it did not conform with an otherwise cheerful tone. Within a week in January I heard Condoleezza Rice say there were 120,000 Iraqi troops trained to ...”

“... in the afternoon Julian turned up with his ragged clothes torn to tatters, which flapped about his white thighs. He put on some clothes of mine and lay panting and sighing after the luxurious enjoyment of so much exercise.’His openness wasn’t typical of the rest of his family either. Julian’s younger sister, Angelica, wrote bitterly in her memoir ...”

“... publicity ‘toxic’ and mistrusted the incestuousness of New York literary circles: ‘great white sharks fighting over a bathtub, you know?’ He had other reasons for wanting to stay out west. A former ‘near great’ junior tennis player and adolescent ‘math-wienie’ – in the words of an essay written for Harper’s in 1991 – he loved the ...”

“... There’s Pavey, a 66-year-old retired electrician in a Manchester United hooded top, a wispy white pageboy haircut and dark glasses, standing by a wall on the bank of the River Avon. He’s holding his right hand horizontally in the air, about thirty centimetres above the top of the wall, which comes up to his waist. The olive-coloured Avon ripples ...”

“... after the election, Aaron Sorkin’s rant on the Vanity Fair website: ‘The Klan won last night. White nationalists. Sexists, racists and buffoons … misogynistic shitheads everywhere … If he does manage to be a douche nozzle without breaking the law for four years, we’ll make it through those four years.’ Or consider the message read out to Vice ...”

“... gimmickry. To me, the decisive moment in his appearance outside a church across the road from the White House, not quite knowing which way up to hold a Bible, was the exposure of the gimmick as an object no longer able to perform its designated narrative or symbolic function. ‘Is that your Bible?’ a reporter asked Trump. ‘It’s a Bible.’ Ngai could ...”

“... an all-round amoral charmer and shit, immune to scandal and opinion, and the envy of lesser men. Tony ‘didn’t know which he resented most – Rupert’s habitual contempt, his ability to sleep anywhere, his effortless acquisition of women …’ There’s also the capacity Rupert shares with a goodish number of other characters in these novels to swallow ...”

“... father was JFK’s assassin. The former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who fancied himself a Tony Soprano boss with a Bruce Springsteen soul, endured fat jokes on stage from Trump, hardly a ballerina himself. The activation of Lindsey Graham’s salivary glands whenever he rises up on his hind legs in defence of Trump and the MAGA agenda is a source of ...”

“... would give him a superficial affinity to that line of elected reps, from Winston Churchill to Tony Benn, for whom, at times, eloquence and historical self-consciousness have seemed ends in themselves. Yet there is another less exalted political figure the mayor recalls: Alastair Campbell. A journalist like Johnson, Campbell tried to shorten the old PR ...”