“... was contrived for off-the-record briefing of American journalists, the joint ‘authors’ being Tony Benn, Stan Orme and Denis Healey. One is tempted to say that even in the MI5 officers’ mess, the idea of Denis Healey collaborating with Messrs Benn and Orme on anything at all must surely have required the assistance of a few double whiskies. The ...”

“... is seductive. As she says, ‘ministers of governments of all shades, energy ministers such as Tony Benn and Peter Walker, civil servants, employees of public utilities, have sat, like Jonson’s Puritans, open-mouthed and bemused, listening to the flood of jargon which has promised that the millennium is just around the corner. Billions of pounds of ...”

“... if ever there was one, all bunting and border controls – which seemed to represent a victory for white van men everywhere. A huge Tory majority looked like the next tabloid fantasy to come true, shoving Britain down a Trump-shaped hole into a post-truth world.That the Daily Mirror, despite being a tabloid, tends not to be written about as if it were one is ...”

“... Friedland and Hecht had a revealing conversation with Stan Cohen, who was formerly part of the white resistance to South Africa’s apartheid regime and now teaches at the Hebrew University’s law school. Cohen is relieved that Israel never developed a theory of racial supremacy, but sees many parallels between the two apartheid regimes and thinks that ...”

“... as far as nuclear weapons are concerned, Iraq is much less of a threat now than it was in 1991. Tony Blair and George W. Bush do not want us to think like this. Khidhir Hamza is the source of many of the headlines claiming that Iraq is on the verge of (or already has) a nuclear weapon capability. The Guardian reported on 1 August that Iraq would have ...”

“... Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, its postwar section makes room for Monty Python but not Geoffrey Hill, or Tony Harrison, or Thom Gunn, or Ted Hughes, or Craig Raine, or James Fenton, or Paul Muldoon, all of whom the Norton squeezes in at the eleventh hour. Ricks, for whom Heaney provides an effective endpoint, is probably right that many anthologies falter with the ...”

“... assurance, the nonchalant way he let the vinegar run from the chip-bag onto the breast of his off-white shirt. But I kept all this quiet knowing there were things he envied about me too. I think each of us treasured this envy, longing to know how the other had changed but disdaining to ask. His friend, Jamie, tells the narrator that he has seen the woman who ...”

“... published in the LRB (5 August). The idea for the poem came from a comment in an excellent book by Tony Sharpe on Wallace Stevens, in which he speculates on the flocks of pigeons mentioned in the last lines of ‘Sunday Morning’: And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to ...”

“... why his political satire, which generally comes across as crass and simplistic on the page (Stupid White Men, Dude, Where’s My Country?), rises to a different level on the screen. By the time he found his medium, with the film Roger and Me in 1989, he had spent more than a decade in various ventures in print journalism, all of which ended in ...”

“... I found the sight of district nurses in their navy blue raincoats both reassuring and appropriate. White coats have gone too now, with doctors indistinguishable from patients except that the doctors are in shirt-sleeves. I like white coats. But then I’m a butcher’s son. White coats ...”

“... deaths in both countries, with ethnic minorities heavily overrepresented. Meanwhile, rage against white supremacism is exploding on American streets. Whatever the fate of these uprisings, the largest since the 1960s, a period of devastation lies ahead. Tens of millions of people are likely to lose their livelihoods and their dignity.As a general insurrection ...”

“... made the Hole into a camera obscura with lid and lens. The collective painted the walls of the pit white, with gesso and gum. Those who came down the ladder into the earth cell, after their eyes adjusted to the absence of light, found the experience captivating. The world above appeared in phantom form, inverted, a ribbon of articulate shadows, trees like ...”

“... described her as ‘the most ignorant politician of her level that I’d come across until I met Tony Blair’, but he thought she was at least touchingly aware of her ignorance, ‘the eternal scholarship girl’. He summed it up by saying: ‘I always liked her, but she always bored me a bit.’ Being boring is a sin for an intellectual. But it is not ...”

“... Victoria cinema. On a visit to Cramond, on the city’s outskirts, he had noticed on the terribly white wall of the public lavatory a lone graffito: ‘Is there nobody queer in Cramond?’ Karl wanted out.It was at Cambridge that I first met him. We were both born in Edinburgh, but his background was working-class and mine was not. That seemed not to ...”

“... ideas from his communist and left-wing rivals: clean-up campaigns, anti-corruption purges and the white short-sleeved uniforms that were meant to convey the PAP’s purity. Meanwhile, his ‘Asian Values’ campaign and his 1980s eugenics programme – one of the few initiatives his citizens rejected – owe debts to Japanese fascism, and the PAP’s ...”