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“... a single minute of the coverage of the escape, because we were to see that videotape – the white car tootling down the highway, the press helicopters covering it from above – over and over again during the subsequent week. Not that watching it after the fact is the same as watching it when the outcome is still unresolved. It’s rather like watching ...”

“... Briefly during the second act Michael Frayn’s stage-play, Make and Break, transcends its setting, a Frankfurt trade fair, touching on a general gloom. Mrs Rogers is treating Garrard, a goatish sales rep, to the fruits of Buddhism. It is late in the day. Elsewhere assignations are arranged, faces stuffed, drinks swilled ...”

“... Paris and London, Peter Hall edits an SSRC Working Party’s Reports on The Inner City in Context, Michael Harloe, in New Perspectives in Urban Change and Conflict, edits papers given at the third Centre for Environmental Studies Conference in 1979, David Donnison reflects on his time as Chairman of the Supplementary Benefits Commission in The Politics of ...”

“... to All Quiet on the Western Front. But he died in 1970, leaving it unfinished: a massive stub. Michael Hofmann, his translator, recalls some other unfinished fictions. But this is not The Mystery of Edwin Drood or The Man without Qualities. Those two books lack their ends, but what remains doesn’t feel raw or rough; they simply break off. The Promised ...”

“... warmed by the Moonies’ unconditional support for him during Watergate, invited Moon to the White House, where the two men prayed together. Nixon’s fall was a grievous blow to Moon, who immediately set out on a campaign of extreme right-wing agitation to reverse what he saw as the decline into leftism inaugurated by Watergate. The Moonie ...”

“... of personal history and the pretty stuff on the public record. Let’s take the spirit of J. Michael Lennon’s ‘double life’ of Norman Mailer and offer that doubleness back as subjective criticism. Mailer, after all, gave us the non-fiction novel, Lennon gives us the pseudo-objective biography, so why can’t I offer the confessional review? On the ...”

“... The new generation of readers, it was felt, did not have much time to think, much less read. Michael Jackson’s antics are now accorded front-page prominence; the books page has been replaced by full-colour spreads on fashion and celebrity lifestyles. Other newspapers, struggling to hold their own against the visual media, have imitated the Times’s ...”

“... Apollo in 1976. In France, ‘Curval’s name is as well-known as Frank Herbert’s in America or Michael Moorcock’s in Britain.’ Brave Old World transports us to ‘Marcom’ – the EEC as it will have developed in the late 21st century. Britain is apparently still in. But since the whole action takes place where France used to be, we are not yet the ...”

“... at the time. Stamm’s second novel, Unformed Landscape (translated like Stamm’s other books by Michael Hofmann), told the story of a 28-year-old Norwegian woman called Kathrine who leaves her second husband and son and, dipping below the Arctic circle for the first time in her life, travels first to Jutland, then to Paris and eventually to Boulogne in ...”

“... be as slight or profound as you like – it’s still loss, and therefore what we’re all about. Michael Bywater knows this. His Lost Worlds regrets the passing of Beans, Grandpa (‘My maternal grandfather is four ways lost. He is dead. He was a man of Monmouthshire. He was a steel man. He was an industrial craftsman. You don’t get much more lost than ...”

“... 1949 most Indians feared Africans (especially Zulus) and the temptation to cling to the skirts of white power was very strong. For the NIC/SACP intelligentsia it was a very painful business. After all, if the black masses were not on their side the whole rationale of radical politics was undermined. But what price self-respect if one had to look cravenly for ...”

“... and more pervasive. The video footage of Floyd’s death offered evidence of both an ideology (white supremacy) and the system that sustains it (racism) at their most fundamental level: state murder. In the following months it sparked debate not just about policing in America, but school curriculums in Britain, the repertoire of the Paris Opéra, St ...”

“... reads like the cast-list of some bizarre Antipodean soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious an advocate of anti-German ...”

“... comic monologue, delivered by Henry Moto. Moto, as we first meet him, is a coloured who passes for white. Later he is a white who masquerades as coloured. For him, there is no separate development, only a crazy confusion. He is ‘an identity in search of a group’ or – supreme term of abuse – a ‘...”

“... in practice, and in any case an immense task of sorting, translating, and analysing lies ahead. Michael Howard, for instance, in a characteristically crisp introduction to The Quest for Stability, asks the basic question whether at the end of the Second World War Stalin actually aspired to global hegemony. This, he says, ‘we shall be able to tell only ...”