“... slickTom Wolfe – talentlessPhilip Roth – jerkIt was a mercy she only had two hands. To be fair, there were some men she liked. They tended to be showbusiness people. She liked Robin Williams, Charlie Chaplin, Tommy Lee Jones and Al Pacino. She also liked Salinger. (‘Jerry’ had been a friend since the 1950s ...”

“... You need​ to be over seventy now to remember the awful thrill of the announcement: ‘I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend.’ For the older generation, Princess Margaret was the unlucky princess. She was our Diana: capricious, passionate, vindictive, doomed to fall in love with rotters, the breakaway royal who hung out with actors and rogues and who was frozen out by a cold-hearted court, finding contentment only in her hospital work and her two children ...”

“... the ‘principal reason’ he opened his millinery business ‘was to bring happiness to the world by making women an inspiration to themselves and everyone who saw them’, it may sound like the usual, gendered fashion hyperbole, but I believe him. Those who admired his work as an observer of fashion – and he was much praised in the last years of his life ...”

“... families’, a staple of New Labour and Conservative rhetoric for about twenty years, fell by the wayside with the political upheavals of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in 2015 and the resignation of David Cameron the following summer. (Theresa May initially hoped to refocus on ‘JAMs’ – Just About ...”

“... Pampa Michi, once a coffee estate: the collateral damage of a monumental but sanctioned land grab by the Peruvian Corporation of London in the 1890s. Who Michi was nobody is certain: a forgotten manager, an outsider, one of the chori or colonos called Michael? The other surviving settlements in the Perené Colony, Pampa Silva and Pampa Whaley, are also named ...”

“... on the saucy metaphors and sprinkling the demotic seasoning, when he is suddenly interrupted by a briefing from Public Health England or the chief medical officer: there is a nasty virus heading this way from China. So what does Superman do? Far from commissioning plans for an emergency response, he swirls his cape and takes the first available ...”

“... The Black Veil is the latest voyage to the bottom of the sink, a journey of self-discovery jinxed by dense fog and treacherous syntax. Moody is best known for his novels, Garden State (which is being released for the first time in the UK to piggyback on the publication of this book),* Purple America and The Ice Storm, and his short-story collections, The Ring ...”

“... which class children are most likely to misbehave in?’ The answer turned out to be Citizenship. And which subject would best teach children ‘respect for authority and the importance of discipline in school’? History. Not any old history, however, and certainly not the trendy kind that asks them to empathise with particular historical ...”

“... other day that Tony Blair’s government had made both obesity and Aids in this country much worse by doing ‘everything it can to promote buggery’. Aside from anything else, this comment might cause us to reflect (buggerishly) on the England beloved of bigots like Tebbit and to see it as a land not only of warm beer and cricket on the village green, but ...”

“... Even those of us who don’t know Malcolm Muggeridge personally can be certain that the charm to which his friends attest would quickly enslave us too, should we be exposed to it. One would probably soon give up quarrelling with him. But his public persona invites quarrel and not much else ...”

“... to bring this up since Other People depends very largely on a trick which is usually thought to be someone else’s trademark. First, to describe the novel. The narrative follows a heroine who has woken in hospital (‘a white room’) lacking all long- and short-term memory. The amnesiac gimmick is common enough in SF and thriller fiction (Other People is ...”

“... to the bombing of Dresden. The scale of the killing, extraordinary as it is, has been exceeded by the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure. The war has required the mobilisation of at least 360,000 reserves: 4 per cent of Israel’s population. From the political and military hierarchy down to individual platoons, the nature of the operations ...”

“... the prep school as the damp, dark, dry-rotted basement of myself: somehow foundational but not to be visited without protective gear.In 2010, as my children chatted in the car on the way back from the playground, I made a note to look up the story when I got home. Instead, I forgot, and it wasn’t until the next day that I read about it. The photographs were ...”

“... for fifteen years against Napoleon, and, at the end of the period, against rising German power. By any historical standard, as great powers they had very few clashing interests. Though both wanted to expand, they could do so for many thousands of miles across Asia without interfering with each other. The implication that Britain and Russia have always been ...”