“... sows violent division. The other people, the unreal ones, are pictured as tools or puppet-masters, the glitter and the rot. Trump is likely to feel no scruple about hardening this contrast. Obama was a softener of the truth, congenitally averse to blunt statement or calling things by their shortest names. Trump is an incorrigible liar. When, for ...”

“... The Color of Truth*, the American scholar Kai Bird presents his study of McGeorge (‘Mac’) and William Bundy. These were the two dynastic technocrats who organised and justified the hideous war in Vietnam. Cold War liberals themselves, with the kept conservative journalist Joseph Alsop they formed a Three of Hearts in the less fastidious quarters of ...”

“... is currently facing’. Even before the winter began, Simon Stevens publicly warned his government masters that the entire system, not just emergency medicine, was teetering. Without an increase in funding, he said, five million people – almost every tenth citizen of England – would find themselves on a waiting list for an operation by 2021. (We’re not ...”

“... to think that what you were about wasn’t simply a mixture of drudgery, discomfort and William Bootlike perplexity; that you’d get back to London in a week, or a month, and sit on one of her twin sofas at about 6:30 as the sun dropped slowly into the frame of the picture-window, daubing the flat with warm reds and tans (‘Why don’t you close ...”

“... bad-trip imagery, like the cut-up technique Bowie used to compose the lyrics, is borrowed from William Burroughs. The title song is introduced with a toe-curling yell of: ‘This ain’t rock’n’roll, this is genocide!’ But that’s soon forgotten in the gloriously overlong, overripe, decadent mess of anarchic guitars, squelching horns and exuberant ...”

“... tactile authority, few rivals outside the work of DeLillo, Pynchon and (more to his own taste) William Gibson. And, as in their novels, local observation in Jameson was complemented by an implacable awareness of what he called the ‘unrepresentable exterior’ enclosing all the slick and streaming phenomena in view. In the novelists, however, allusion to ...”

“... was somehow the cause of the war.’Neiman mentions the so-called Dunning School, named after William Dunning, a professor at Columbia at the turn of the 20th century, who, with his followers, disparaged the efforts made during the Reconstruction to establish the civil and economic rights (forty acres and a mule) of former slaves and gave intellectual ...”

“... about whose life we know very little emerges by this measure as the undisputed Top British Person: William Shakespeare (1564-1616, ‘playwright and poet’) is allotted more than 30,000 words, a length achieved only by devoting a large proportion of them to various aspects of his literary after-life – about which, of course, we know a good deal more. The ...”

“... Westminster Bridge at its own reflection in the water, which turns out to have the features of William Shakespeare. The reference is to a mock-solemn claim by Amis that ‘in two hundred years I want them to be talking about Dante, Shakespeare and Martin Amis.’ The text of the Time Out feature by Richard Rayner, one of the most impressive of all the ...”

“... Tories said once before that Britain was becoming a foreign land,’ he wrote, referring to William Hague in 2001. ‘We told those who agreed that if they came with us we would give them back their country. As we found, there is no future in that kind of approach for a party that aspires to govern, or appeal beyond a disgruntled minority. We cannot ...”

“... reported, ‘all business is at a standstill and the students, who are running the movement, are masters of the situation. There is a sort of epidemic of resignations from President down to Parliament.’ Aglen evidently appreciated his work, taking him as private secretary on a tour of inspection by cruiser round ports in South China later that ...”

“... only ones among her critics who got her remotely right. They included Chris Patten, John Patten, William Waldegrave and Tristan Garel-Jones, and were soon to be joined by John Major. In the pamphlet they used as an epigraph a line from Macmillan: ‘We have at least the most important thing of all at the head of our government, a prime minister of ...”

“... in London. Contact with Hale eventually resumed. In 1927 he told a friend (a fellow American, William Force Stead): ‘I had a letter from a girl in Boston this morning whom I have not seen or heard from for years and years. It brought back something to me that I had not known for a long time.’ In October 1930 she came to tea in London. Vivien liked her ...”

“... writer, and length of life, might be expected to provide some co-ordinates. Yet even among modern masters there is little consistency. James died in his early seventies, Musil in his early sixties: Leon Edel and Karl Corino awarded them each two thousand pages. Kafka, who barely reached the age of forty, yielded only five hundred fewer from Reiner ...”

“... the 1960s, and as a protraction of the colonial past. France and Spain were Morocco’s colonial masters, each with tranches of its own in the territory. The foundations of colonial rule had been laid by European mercantile adventurers, but it wasn’t until the early 1900s that the pretext for state intervention arose, when foreign lenders lured Moulay ...”