“... to Fanny Burney. She was swept, as Second Keeper of the Robes, into the train of Queen Charlotte, George III’s wife, when she too was in her thirties and famous as the author of two bestsellers, Cecilia and her rumbustious, read-on first novel, Evelina, which Oxford has now reissued as a World’s Classics paperback. The potential for psychological delicacy ...”

“... corporate democracy’. This revolt against the era and ethos of the CBCs (Bill Clinton, Blair, Bush Jr, Brown, Cameron and Hillary Clinton) offered the giddy prospect of ‘a jailbreak from the old order’, filling its supporters with ‘energy and glee’. Barnett respects ‘the audacity of those I know who voted to Leave. They are not racists, they are ...”

“... in Britain and who died, unsung, in exile. In trying to understand the historical Mackintosh, we have to deal both with the commercialisation of his legacy – the ‘Mockin’tosh’, as Murray Grigor termed it, that fills the shops – and the tendency to see him as a lone figure instead of a man who, like all great artists, did not just borrow but ...”

“... Murray types his poems with a crooked finger, broken in a childhood struggle with his cousin George. As Murray’s depressed mother suffered successive miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy, she grew increasingly stern towards her only son, who was sent to live in a boarding house at Taree, New South Wales, where he went to secondary school. He was there ...”

“... what is it about starting a website that makes people think they have a lot in common with George Washington? – is now a not very funny comic wine columnist. Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge is a period novel about Silicon Alley. Pynchon is fond of silly names, and in the dotcom bubble they seemed to be ...”

“... else. The Obama speech is political convention boilerplate, the usual feelgood-God-bless-America-we’re-the-greatest, with hammer and anvil parallelisms, antitheses, and the occasional chiasmus for spice. Obama gives it a multicultural twist, reprising the now famous story of his mixed-race background, modest upbringing and unlikely rise to the top of the ...”

“... or at least a cosmic melodrama – to give them real meaning, and intimations of ultimate victory. George W. Bush’s policy after September 2001 ‘has been closely shaped by the memory of the Iron Curtain’, Wright maintains, while its legacy has helped liberals and ex-Marxists to switch a ‘polarising habit of thought ...”

“... We are​ in the African bush, at night, in the mid-1950s. At a campfire Father Tassin, a Jesuit palaeontologist, is questioning Saint-Denis, the French colonial administrator of this corner of Chad. Tassin is looking for information about a mysterious figure called Morel, whose recent activities have scandalised all of French Equatorial Africa ...”

“... generous or sentimental enough to fictionalise the relationship. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell gave his friendless, dowdy and self-pitying protagonist, Comstock, one true pal: the editor and patron Ravelston, proprietor of the small yet reliable magazine Antichrist. This Ravelston – some composite of Sir Richard Rees and John Middleton ...”

“... skies’. At the same time, US Air Force Command issued a warning to its civilian contractors: ‘We believe Iran will strike back in a tit for tat fashion – mass casualties.’ Warnings became more specific: ‘We believe Europe is the likely target for a retaliatory attack . . . due to the large concentration of ...”

“... of contemporary critics: much less to their own opinions. When Novel on Yellow Paper appears, we are told of the ‘mandarin approval’ of ‘wits so exquisite and discriminating’ as Raymond Mortimer, Noël Coward and Desmond Shawe-Taylor; on the publication of a book of poems a flurry of plaudits – ‘grimly entertaining’, ‘brilliantly funny and ...”

“... event . . . ruthlessly resets all ecological clocks’, ending urban civilisation as we know it. As Davis has shown in his two devastating books on the political economy of disaster, Ecology of Fear and Late Victorian Holocausts, the combination of untamed capitalist development, indifference to the environment and disregard for ...”

“... James Cagney had his moments of deadpan nastiness, but there’s the mother thing. Perhaps George Raft came close, but I suspect that’s more the result of moribund acting. There isn’t any doubt about Michael Rooker in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (one of the few good films I wish I’d never seen): as blank and merciless a psychopath as ...”

“... queue of anxious depositors outside a branch of Northern Rock in September 2007 – the idea that we might be living through our own version of the 1930s has proved irresistible. The run on Northern Rock augured a financial collapse on the scale of 1929, and has been followed by the re-emergence in the West of protectionist posturing, authoritarian ...”

“... has turned into the missed signals of mobile phone chat. I think of that lost world, the way we lived before these new networking technologies, as having two poles: solitude and communion. The new chatter puts us somewhere in between, assuaging fears of being alone without risking real connection. It is a shallow between two deep zones, a safe spot ...”