“... shunted aside at the New Yorker as postmodernists, minimalists and collagists (specifically Donald Barthelme) became the vogue. Updike was spared the indignity of finding himself on the outs, though the perpetual honeymoon had its bumpy patches. Tina Brown’s Batmobile arrival from Vanity Fair to assume the editorship in 1992 initially proved ...”

“... and of the Norreys family who lived there. I leave it open on a chair hoping that Rupert will read it, Rycote Church being one of his favourite places. Also open on another chair is Richard Hoggart’s Promises to Keep, in which among other things he mentions not feeling he belongs to ‘the English Literary Happy Family’, as I hope neither do I.21 ...”

“... the philosophy of their time. But they differ in scope and emphasis, so it is well worthwhile to read them both. Benjamin Lipscomb is American; Clare Mac Cumhaill is Irish and Rachael Wiseman is British. His book covers a longer time span, and goes more deeply into the philosophical controversies in which the four were engaged, particularly the ...”

“... Preston Sturges​ died in August 1959, when Donald Trump was thirteen years old. So it’s not his fault that the uses to which the grandiose Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach has more recently been put include the development of a club of which Jeffrey Epstein was briefly a member, as well as an impromptu storage facility for state secrets ...”

“... Wittgenstein’s private language argument, but even more serious objections could be derived from Donald Davidson’s argument against psychological laws. The need to undertake Buddhist training in order to be able to assess the doctrine raises the question why anyone would rationally want to do this. If Buddhism is true in what it claims, it is certainly ...”

“... other British agents, back in England in the Thirties, at Cambridge, briefing the undergraduate Donald Railton who has already been recruited as a mole. This is stirring stuff. But verisimilitude in thrillers is not achieved by introducing Cumming and Kell from real life. It is achieved by the authenticity of the jargon (Le Carré) and of the ...”

“... strong sense that Trump reminded me of someone I had seen regularly on TV, but it wasn’t TV’s Donald Trump. Then I got it. The working environment this White House brings to mind is a reality show that displays a deeper level of truth by being entirely unreal. Woodward’s book reads more than anything like a mockumentary, and the person Trump most ...”

“... of Buckley provoked discontent in right-wing reviewers (once they had given it a ‘Washington read’ and searched for their names in the index). Not all the facts of the life were convenient. What appeared to be a career on the permanent offensive looked somewhat different when viewed at longer range. The same Buckley who swooned over McCarthy was ...”

“... Schoenbergian. Not that the classical tradition had been exactly ignored or unappreciated here. Donald Tovey, dying in 1940, had built up since the turn of the century a body of commentary covering exactly the same field, and comparable, too, in being predominantly occasional – programme notes, encyclopedia entries, contributions to symposia and so ...”

“... volunteers. Also Plaza Hotel employees, priests, rabbis and psychotherapists. During lulls I would read from one of four cork boards, which displayed handwritten notes to lost family members, phone numbers of people who had extra beds in their homes, a safe list, locations and times of numerous memorial services, an announcement stating that this was the last ...”

“... up on this odd and wholly characteristic ambivalence when he wrote to congratulate him: ‘When I read the book it seemed to me so rockingly funny that nothing else would seem funny again.’Decline and Fall is one of a number of Waugh’s books to have been reissued recently by Penguin, in hardback and with new introductions. It follows the hapless Paul ...”

“... a retired admiral who had served as Bush's deputy director at the CIA; and, to a lesser extent, Donald Gregg, Bush’s national security adviser and another veteran of CIA covert operations. Moreau’s team mostly worked out of a room near the National Military Command Centre on the ground floor of the Pentagon. They could also unobtrusively man a desk or ...”

“... in the global advancement of the far right. On the day of his second presidential inauguration, Donald Trump signed an executive order: ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government’. The order affirms that there are only two sexes, male and female, as a matter of ‘immutable biological ...”

“... heavyweight division, only to get KO’d by the champ himself – sucker-punched. Mailer read the book in galley and told Podhoretz he liked it. It was Podhoretz’s hope after the volley of abuse from nearly every quarter that Mailer would ride to the cavalry rescue. But when Mailer’s essay on Making It, ‘Up the Family Tree’, appeared in the ...”

“... but also temperamentally, as one keeps being brought up against one’s failures – failure to read the books for a start, but also failure to turn them to any other advantage. There are loads of books about Housman, for instance, on which I once thought to base a play, and all the books on Kafka which, though I did write two plays about him, still seem a ...”