“... problem, so long as the poor are better off than they used to be. ‘However rich a society,’ as John Moore, secretary of state for social security under Thatcher, once put it, ‘it will drag the incubus of relative poverty with it up the income scale. The poverty lobby would in their definition find poverty in Paradise.’ As national income rises, the ...”

“... to promise a high-class thriller, though the 1970s setting suggests murky dealings – with John le Carré being thanked, under the non-pen name of David Cornwell, for ‘irresistible reminiscences’ – rather than any particular glamour. Serena Frome (the pronunciation of her name, Froom, poshly at odds with its spelling), both intelligent and ...”

“... historical record. What was Haywood doing with all those beds, or allowing others to do? When Sir John Fielding, the magistrate and half-brother of the novelist, called Covent Garden ‘the great square of Venus’, a place crowded with ‘lewd women enough to fill a mighty colony’, he gave blunt expression to the neighbourhood’s reputation. Thronged by ...”

“... admiration for D.H. Lawrence as well as Hitler, Bradford has brought himself up to speed on John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992). Not liking modernism and not wanting to be taken for poncy literary types were Amis-Larkin stances too, and proudly despising Beckett, in particular, is an Amis family tradition. (Kingsley to Larkin in ...”

“... hagiographies, and the starting point for all modern treatments, was written by the antiquarian John Aubrey towards the end of Hobbes’s long and eventful life (1588-1679). This became the fullest of the pen-portraits which make up Brief Lives, and from Aubrey we learn that Hobbes was, in many respects, a quintessential product of the age. He grew up in ...”

“... The only public figure to denounce capitalism in the past 25 years, Hobsbawm claims, was Pope John Paul II. All the same, another couple of decades later, the fainthearted witnessed a system so exultant and impregnable that it only just managed to keep the cash machines open on the high streets. Eric Hobsbawm, who was born in the year of the Bolshevik ...”

“... thoughtfulness that he later accused her of lacking was especially hurtful. He wrote to his friend John Forster that she ‘wants to know whether you have “any books to send her”. If you have any literary rubbish on hand, please to shoot it here.’ She responded to every slight with unshakeable loyalty, even after Dickens had turned her out of the family ...”

“... torments and frightful beasts painted like jewels. More recently, the awakened creature in John Carpenter’s The Thing, and H.R. Giger’s alien in the films of the same name are offered only in brief glimpses, to tease the audience, which wants to look long and hard on their strange and extraordinary beauty. Aesthetically as well as practically, it ...”

“... The supposed military success has revived the previously languishing campaign of the hawkish John McCain, who will now almost certainly be his party’s candidate for the presidency. Seldom has the official Iraqi and American perception of what is happening in Iraq felt so different from the reality. Barricaded behind the walls of the Green ...”

“... wan, sometimes wanton, according to the interplay between Humbert’s sentimentality and desire. John le Carré’s Perfect Spy, Magnus Pym, owes his training to a con man father. The only way for the child to know what is going on (Ricky Pym’s words and actions don’t tell him – on the contrary, they are monstrous mystifications) is to keep watch, to ...”

“... class, as Orwell so shocked his publisher by claiming – smelled: in the 1930s, Pugh tells us, St John’s College, Cambridge thought six baths quite adequate for the needs of 450 undergraduates. Attitudes to divorce, homosexuality and indeed sexuality in any form remained puritanical; films were censored; and the royal family was treated by public and press ...”

“... and reworked by middle-class men with sexual anxieties of their own. ‘A Night in a Workhouse’, John Addington Symonds recalled, ‘brought the emotional tumour which was gathering within me to maturity,’ inspiring him to write a long passionate poem about cross-class love between men, including a section entitled ‘Kay’. Were the sexual ...”

“... of us outgrow too well; the madness of adolescence, ‘just a face we are going through’, as John Lennon once said; the madness of love, where the only sanity would be a proper respect for our folly and an attempt not to do harm; autism; schizophrenia; depression; and our failure to find any sanity in our hunger for money (‘money gives people an ...”

“... law did not allow them to be confiscated. The PSI is the brainchild of the unapologetically brash John Bolton, who served as under-secretary of state for arms control and international security during Bush’s first term, before being nominated, to the consternation of most career diplomats, as US ambassador to the UN. Bolton is an accomplished international ...”

“... It also takes Ozick a lot of literature to produce a little literature. As much as Borges or John Barth, she is a metafictional author: her subject is books and writers; obsessive readers, people driven to distraction by fiction. Lars Andemening, the protagonist of her third novel, The Messiah of Stockholm (1987), is an orphaned Swedish book reviewer who ...”