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“... Howard Jacobson’s first novel, Coming from Behind, was published last year, and made one think that a new exponent of the comic academic narrative had arrived. Jacobson’s hero, Sefton Goldberg, Jewish and highly suspicious of his Gentile surroundings, is aggressive towards the literature he’s supposed to be teaching, to a degree that makes Leavis seem like a nice auntie ...”

“... Party Conference by authors who have some concern about the future of the Labour Party. Healey’s is a magnificent picture-book strung on a slender autobiographical thread, which he describes as being ‘partly about photography, partly about the world and partly about me’. Although he has included some political anecdotes, the book makes no claim to be a ...”

“... large pictures of his photogenic face. There is a wall of his books which (with a few of T. F.’s and Llewellyn’s offering fraternal support) seem to dominate over the shelves of Dostoevsky, Hesse and Tolkien, while a Beethoven quartet accompanies the browsing, and little fish play in the Oriental pond by the occult ...”

“... he descends to the Times Square subway station and writes ‘REPENT!’ on the wall of the men’s lavatory with a crayon. Around noon, he preaches to a crowd outside the Hotel Metropole and is mocked by a ‘Negro boy’ who compares the Trinity to ‘Purity, Body and Flavor’, the advertising slogan for Ballantine beer. Burke retreats with his followers ...”

“... of the year. Instead of a hard but manageable slog to overtake the Conservatives as Britain’s largest party at the next general election, Labour politicians now contemplate a dismal scene of long-term exclusion from government: from the government, that is, of the rump UK, minus Scotland. The reason is that ...”

“... taking the salute at a victory parade, have made it hard to remember why it all at first seemed so comic. But the early incredulity often made points which were lost when solemn passions took over. I remember an editorial conference, the Task Force scarcely beyond Finistère. Rights and wrongs had not yet come into the discussion; the argument was between ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... record after her pet pit bull gored a child (the dog escaped the chop thanks to the Princess’s top-dollar brief). Even Prince William, once the press’s golden boy, was reported to have dispatched flunkeys to buy him porno mags from the local newsagent. Then came bruits of rape within the precincts of Buckingham ...”

“... email was hot with people wanting more.’ Even then Sansom thought the book might flop, so he began another, set in 1930s Spain. As it turned out, Dissolution (2003) was a bestseller and a sequel was commissioned. He completed his Spanish Civil War novel, Winter in Madrid (2006), anyway. Since then he has published another modern thriller, Dominion ...”

“... the one with the handbag, the one with the cowboy hat, 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 ...”

“... of Idi Amin, who had seized the presidency in a coup the previous year. The expulsion of Uganda’s Asian population, estimated at seventy thousand, was announced in August; we were given three months to leave. Around twenty thousand had Ugandan citizenship. Roughly the same number had applied for citizenship, but their applications remained unprocessed – a ...”

“... helicopters. We could drive there in forty minutes, but travel by road is far too dangerous. So we just wait, and spend the day trying to avoid the heat, which is impossible because the air-conditioning in the tent doesn’t work. One Naafi serves the entire base, with a dry bar and a small supermarket. But the generator can only power half the building ...”

“... in dispute. These post-colonial specks in the South Atlantic were, supremely, a diplomat’s preoccupation. Yet not the smallest virtue of Mr Charlton’s important book is the evidence it summons up which shows that the Palliser thesis is only half-right. For decades, the people may have been ignorant, but the ...”

“... designed, bound and typeset by its publishers – represents the merest sliver of Mavis Gallant’s lifelong achievement. Even discounting the two novels and the books of essays, what we have here can amount to little more than half the content of her nine published short-story collections. Gallant has made the selection herself, rejecting ‘straight humour ...”

“... by only a year, one of them in the exhibition of his photographs of the Crimean War at the Queen’s Gallery in Edinburgh (until 26 November) and the other not. The first, from 1854, seems conventional: we see a Victorian gentleman – hair parted, beard trimmed to cover only the underside of his face, leaving the strong chin to fight its own battles ...”