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“... the vicar; the vicar, the Reverend Nut, wants only the ghost of William Cowper to come into his brown study and read him The Task; the Sexton wants worms; worms want the vicar. Lambkins on those impossible hills, frolic, gambol and are sheepish under the all-seeing eye of Uncle Teapot, the Celestial Tinker ...’ In this parody (the Listener, 17 October ...”

“... a road novel midway and ends with a sloppy orgy in the Texas desert. The ever ironical narrator, David Bell, is fond of making statements like ‘I was an extremely handsome young man,’ and worships at the altar of Burt Lancaster: ‘Burt in the moonlight was a crescendo of male perfection but no less human because of it.’ ‘I don’t think my first ...”

“... from government: from the government, that is, of the rump UK, minus Scotland. The reason is that David Cameron, attempting to outflank the SNP during a midwinter silly season offensive, has managed to provoke Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond, into a daring dash for independence. Salmond is not – as the English fail miserably to understand – an ...”

“... by homicidal maniacs on a collision course are also coming closer to one another. The novelist David Lodge, in one of the earnest but flustered contributions typical of Authors take sides on the Falklands, is more realistic. He writes that regaining the Falklands is not worth one human life. But he then confesses: ‘There is no doubt in my mind that ...”

“... Boston University. The first of them, a satirical attack on The Old Faith and the New, a work of David Strauss’s dotage (1871, English translation 1873), begins with a memorable disclaimer. The German public’s eagerness to infer from the military victory over France a victory over French culture, Nietzsche writes, is a pernicious delusion, ‘not simply ...”

“... justice, tax evasion, squandering public money and undermining democracy. Once the Burrell and Brown/ Havlik trials collapsed, the finger pointed directly at the Sovereign herself, who emerged (depending on one’s preferred theory) as Machiavellian, culpably misinformed, vindictive or simply gaga. Whatever the explanation, the upshot is a mighty waste of ...”

“... Shardlake has a gimlet eye and a sharp mind. His character owes something to Chesterton’s Father Brown, except that where Brown draws on insights into human nature deriving from years in the confessional, Shardlake’s speciality is the sifting and weighing of evidence.Like all the best detectives, Shardlake is also an ...”

“... and then their grey successors. We were so happy when those fresh-faced challengers, the Blair/Brown and Clinton/Gore double acts, showed them the door. People smarter than I was probably foresaw the compromises that would follow, but I doubt any of us fully anticipated our financialised, deregulated world – a world in which we now individually struggle ...”

“... on the black plastic decking, not knowing what to do with myself. Some Afghan workers in Kellogg, Brown and Root T-shirts started lowering the flags. ‘Those fucking flags spend more time at half-mast than they do up,’ one soldier said as he walked past. 1 July. The flags will stay at half-mast today. The Grenadier Guards were hit by a suicide bomber as ...”

“... in this apparently insignificant end of empire, to varied and sometimes unexpected effect. George Brown, briefly Foreign Secretary in the 1966 Labour Government, thought British sovereignty should be tidily ceded to the eager Argentinians. Michael Stewart, his successor, was more cagey. But he did draft a concessionary agreement, only to be driven by the ...”

“... Gallant has been offered a regular platform under the benign aegis of William Maxwell and, later, David Menaker. Although they span almost half a century – the earliest was published in 1953, the latest in 1995, Gallant’s 73rd year – they are nonetheless eerily consistent in voice and preoccupation. Gallant writes about exiled people: characters in ...”

“... Sebastopol, with its wash of grey sky over a stack of black landscape, is reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich, the town at its centre tiny, visible only in matchstick detail. Elsewhere Crimea, under the unforgiving sun, is rendered lunar, or Martian – pitted, rubbly, leached of shade, the scrub on the cliffs like spotted mould. Fenton made an ...”

“... he resembles Otto Dix – maybe it’s all German solitudinarianism, out of Nietzsche or Caspar David Friedrich.) His boldly outlined conical or tubular forms, unconventional colour balances and bright, acidic palettes stand out anywhere. He painted social milieus of pleasure, soirées and resorts, bars and dances, the ambassador looking despondent in ...”

“... choosing: as well as Anthony Kennedy, Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Lewis Powell, Warren Burger, David Souter and John Paul Stevens all did so. For Ginsburg to stay on the court risked ‘disaster’, in Randall Kennedy’s view: ‘The female Thurgood Marshall will be replaced by a female Clarence Thomas.’ Marshall was the first black justice on the ...”

“... to have been foreseen from the time of my birth, for they gave me a couple of good Jewish names, David and Bernard, but preceded them with Anthony. I was always called Tony. This perhaps went well with the sort of role my mother wanted me to play. When I was eight she said she would like me to have a career like Noël Coward’s; later she suggested that I ...”