“... of isolation and unease, of hopelessness. The strange democracy of madness is his theme: David Hume and his breakdown, as described to the physician George Cheyne; and from Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne, the story of the idiot boy, who spent the summer eating bees, his only earthly occupation. Porter takes his cue from Burton’s ...”

“... and trailers, laden with the leafy tops of root vegetables, hasten to a strip of woodland where a green mountain is rising alongside the ricks ... one feels that everything has been well thought out and organised’ – are contrasted with the reality of rotting dumps of vegetables and meals of violet boiled potatoes. As for well thought-out ...”

“... the word mortgage had a fearsome ring then, which it may have regained today. There was Anne of Green Gables, straight from the orphanage and received coldly because she had red hair and should have been a boy. There was Tom Sawyer, painting the fence for Aunt Polly. Boys did not seem to work quite so hard as girls. Huck Finn, of course, is the Orphan that ...”

“... But there are immediate difficulties with the book, difficulties of a kind once ascribed by David Lodge to a figure seen at academic conferences: the figure of the Deconstructionist who, radically sceptical about the existence of selfhood, identity and the subject, nonetheless continues to go for an early-morning jog. The jogging Deconstructionist – a ...”

“... As I write this, the Liberal MP David Alton is about to introduce a Bill changing the upper time limit on legal abortions from 28 weeks to 18. If he succeeds, more women will be forced to give birth against their will, and more will be obliged to give birth to children already known to be severely handicapped. Whether he succeeds will be determined by a House of Commons where 13 out of every 16 MPs belong to the sex that does not get pregnant and does not, traditionally, take on the main responsibility of childcare ...”

“... an evocative jacket illustration. Pink clouds portending passion and doom mass over a pleasantly green West Riding landscape, while a man and a woman, with their backs turned, contemplate the view over a workmanlike stretch of dry-stonewalling. It seems fair enough to take the dry-stonewalling as a complimentary metaphor for John Braine’s craft. The Two of ...”

“... For three years​ David Blunkett, then the Labour home secretary, had an affair with Kimberly Fortier, publisher of the Spectator. The affair came to an end in the summer of 2004. A few weeks later, on Friday 13 August, Andy Coulson, editor of the News of the World, showed up at Blunkett’s office in Sheffield to ask whether he was having an affair with a married woman ...”

“... man has revealed the hidden depths, the ugly unmastered history, of the country he claims to lead. David Duke, the former Imperial Wizard of the Klan and a former Louisiana state representative, whose endorsement Trump could barely bring himself to disavow, said that Unite the Right was intended to ‘fulfil the promises of Donald Trump’. When Fields set off ...”

“... the reason novelists and short-story writers are often quite distinct breeds). The American writer David Means will have none of this. His highly original stories are coats that have been reversed to show their linings. Rather than lightly hint at an exquisite pattern or organising symbol, he likes to accentuate the pattern, to dash it in the reader’s ...”

“... the skilled workers of the North-East’, it would put Britain ‘at the helm’ of the ‘global green industrial revolution’, it would ‘level up’ the ‘industrial heartlands’. It was ‘a major boost’ and ‘a resounding vote of confidence’. It would ‘unlock investment’. In an especially tired cliché engendered by the very technology the ...”

“... house in Vence in February 1946. On Picasso’s orders, she wore her mauve blouse and ‘willow-green’ slacks – two colours Matisse liked very much. It worked: Matisse took an immediate liking to Gilot, whose eyebrows reminded him of ‘circumflex accents’, and he declared that he would like to make a portrait of her with ...”

“... butcher, the writer as sensitive brute. Then, in a small alcove, I saw the parrot. It was bright green and perky-eyed, with its head at an inquiring angle. ‘Psittacus,’ ran the inscription: ‘Parrot borrowed by G. Flaubert from the Museum of Rouen and placed on his work-table during the writing of Un Coeur Simple, where it is called Loulou, the parrot ...”

“... written and of a balls-aching boredom.’ In 1960 he found something he did like. He announced to David Selznick that ‘a delightful book’ called To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee was ‘going to be a great success’. He himself, he wrote, was the model for the character Dill, being a childhood friend of the author’s. The first letter in Too Brief a ...”

“... modern art culture – Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Krasner, Hans Hofmann, the sculptor David Smith – which had spent a decade submitting to the master. ‘Aha,’ Gorky is supposed to have said coldly to de Kooning on first being shown the younger artist’s Picasso-saturated work, ‘so you have ideas of your own.’ Picasso’s aren’t good ...”

“... at the 82nd Airborne Division headquarters, Mowhoush returned home. He showed his wife a green card he had been given: a document, he claimed, that gave him permission to retrieve his detained children from Tiger FOB. (Later, when Mowhoush’s body was released, there was no green card among his effects.) The sons ...”