“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of war and the actual wars with revolutionary France and then with Napoleon. But when you read about his career step by step you realise how little his perspective ever widened to become international in scope. At the end of a century in which Britain fought seven wars with France, he was interested almost exclusively in the way French tendencies ...”

“... her contact with the Surrealists in prewar Paris. Once in America, she became an extremely well-read and hard-working analytic patient. Her full analysis with Lowenfeld lasted from 1952 to 1967; after that, she remained in touch with him and had two further intensive but brief periods of therapy. After Lowenfeld’s death in 1985, she continued a ...”

“... to be a language,’ Johns noted in the early 1960s – or, more precisely, a language game. He read Wittgenstein in the summer of 1961, Philosophical Investigations in particular, but already by 1959 he had let colours and names slip away from one another, and in 1960 he superimposed numbers, 0 through 9, to the point of illegibility. With Fool’s House ...”

“... souverainisme is not nativist or protectionist,’ he writes, distancing Brexit’s victory from Donald Trump’s. ‘Where Trump railed at Chinese exporters, British Leavers called for a bilateral free-trade deal with China.’ A ‘frustration with the Establishment’ is all the two have in common. This description of the referendum, which Hannan ...”

“... time from a visit to the Scotia Bar in Stockwell Street, where the dissidents met now and then to read their work and shout down the official festival. The group adopted the name Workers’ City – which spelled out their opposition to that recently developed area around Blackfriars and Ingram Street known as Merchant City – and set about picketing some ...”