“... postwar renaissance. Thomas Bernhard was the acknowledged leader of the dissident pack, with Peter Handke and the Forum Stadtpark group from Graz representing the next wave of an obligatory avant-garde. Jelinek was at the young end of this group, but gained instant recognition within it. It was her natural mode to épater les bourgeois, starting with her ...”

“... of the child behind the man, Mandelson’s short-trousered induction into political life. Boy Peter on a Hovis bicycle! That was the madeleine moment in an interminable chronicle of not-saying, arcane rituals of grazing and trouser-changing unmatched since Roberto Rossellini made The Taking by Power by Louis XIV for French television. Triggered by an ...”

“... be infested with moles. The business schools have been covering the ground with Malcolm Bradbury, Martin Wiener and Correlli Barnett. Their audit of the nation is complete. Confirming old suspicions about the degeneracy of the sociology department, it has also brought out a newer truth about English culture and its responsibility for the decline of the ...”

“... so coolly or callously, and so at odds with what we know of his own quiet lifestyle that led Peter Gay to describe Burckhardt as an intellectual voluptuary. The founders of the new history may have seen a foreshadowing in Burckhardt, but it was Durkheim they modelled themselves on. The latter’s objective approach, which demanded a hard society of hard ...”

“... Joseph P. Kennedy. Jacobs paraphrases the Rat Pack’s foreign minister without portfolio, Dean Martin: ‘Wops, nigs, hebes, what the fuck was the difference? We were all up against the wall and fucking well better stick together.’As with Elvis Presley and Charlie Parker, you feel Destiny’s real leg-up was provided by the ferocious will of Sinatra’s ...”

“... an actual dispute about contemporary art was staged at the Tate – defending, Michael Craig-Martin, leading light at Goldsmiths’ College; prosecuting, Hilton Kramer, editor of the New Criterion (it’s telling that there was no obvious British champion on this side). It was made a condition that the speakers should not address each other. Afterwards I ...”

“... played a part in the failure to convict Tony’s killers. In 1997, the alleged IRA getaway driver Martin McGartland published a memoir, Fifty Dead Men Walking, in which he admitted to having been an undercover agent working for RUC Special Branch; the book’s blurb claims that the information he passed on saved the lives of ‘at least fifty ...”

“... the essential, the thrilling thing was to ‘smack the pansies down’. The period covered by Peter Parker’s astonishing two-volume compilation culminates in the pansies’ at least partial vindication, the long deferred passage of the Wolfenden Committee’s recommendations into law in 1967. Together these books present for the first time an assemblage ...”

“... Yassin. In between those two events, in 1947, the Irgun captured two British sergeants, Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice, both National Service conscripts, and then hanged them, leaving their bodies booby-trapped. There was a spasm of rage in England, where two Jewish Labour MPs expressed their ‘shame and humiliation’, and the Jewish Chronicle said that ...”

“... head, more in sadness than anything else. ‘No,’ he answered. I later discovered his identity: Martin Schulz, now running against Angela Merkel. As he put it back in October, when president of the European Parliament: ‘I refuse to imagine a Europe where lorries and hedge funds are free to cross borders but citizens are not.’ Liam Fox resigned on 14 ...”

“... For anyone with a teenage daughter their scabrous subject-matter is hard to take. They would scare Martin Amis. It needed a true appreciation of literary talent to spot their quality. The same true appreciation ensures that the prose in the LRB rarely falls below a certain standard and that the level of argument is kept up. Not all of the best LRB writers are ...”

“... him in America in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, which is more pungently caught in the oral biography Peter Manso produced in 1985, yet Lennon often puts his finger on the kind of detail that makes sense of Mailer’s character. Pearl Kazin (Alfred Kazin’s sister) was an editor at Harper’s Bazaar and her manner was said to be quite superior. She deployed it ...”

“... is merely bored. This occurs with many of the poets in Michael Schmidt’s anthology, for though Peter Scupham, Jeremy Hooker, Jeffrey Wainwright, Dick Davies and John Ash are all highly talented and painstaking artists, they seem to be fashioning their poems for themselves and each other. As Auden and Eliot showed, ‘difficult’ poetry can still be ...”

“... view of Shakespeare’s national allegiance was eloquently summed up by another Philadelphian, Peter Markoe, in 1786: Monopolising Britain! Boast no more His genius to your narrow bounds confin’d; Shakespeare’s bold spirit seeks our western shore, A gen’ral blessing for the world design’d, And, emulous to form the rising age, The noblest Bard ...”

“... polls predicted (as usual) but no better in seats won. Only 20 seats changed hands – or 21 if Martin Bell’s old seat of Tatton is included. The Conservatives had the largest turnover – winning nine seats but losing eight. Labour was the biggest loser over all – it lost eight and won two – and the Liberal Democrats gained the most, losing two and ...”