“... begins Garner’s first novel, Monkey Grip (1977), whose narrator, Nora, ushers you to the kitchen table then leaves you to pick your way through the raucous crowd gathered there in the summer of 1975. Here is Martin, her faithful lover, ‘teetering as many were that summer on the dizzy edge of smack’. Here is ...”

“... think tank pamphlet. Two of those hired to fill senior editorial positions, Charles Leadbeater and Martin Jacques, were ex-Communists who had wound up their party and formed Demos, a research centre aligned to Tony Blair’s New Labour project. Geoff Mulgan, a former Trotskyist and director of Demos, became a contributor to the paper’s opinion pages, as did ...”

“... like Clever Gretel (one of the two Grimms’ tales reprinted here) who eats up all the food in the kitchen but outwits her master and foils his anger. As a fairy-tale riddle recorded by Goethe puts it: ‘What’s more magnificent than gold? Light. What’s more exhilarating than light? Speech.’ There is, however, one significant casualty in these ...”

“... George Floyd was choked to death on a Minneapolis sidewalk; the novel itself begins weeks after Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968, and concerns twin girls who saw their own father lynched. ‘I wanted to write a book that was not just about Black pain,’ Bennett continued, ‘but also about Black love.’ Her novel, which has been at the ...”

“... with four girls under her supervision. Hierarchies below stairs were as rigid as above. ‘The kitchen,’ she explains, ‘never made toast.’ McLelland’s move from Belvoir to Styles, the home of Agatha Christie, was, she thought, ‘a come down’. Indeed the mass exodus from service between the wars was owed only in part to new opportunities: it was ...”

“... in it. Then bent down, took the second pail, and walked off towards the pantry, past all the kitchen drawers so full of sharp and threatening things.Such spiky delights. The passage follows a description of a group of servant children – ‘he’ is a young Black servant – taking the piss out of their masters and mistresses. It’s a kind of purposive ...”

“... not be triedAt the last day? Will it then boot theeTo say a Philip, or a Gregory,A Harry, or a Martin taught thee this?(‘Philip’ is Philip II of Spain, ‘Gregory’ the pope, ‘Harry’ the Tudor king whose marital woes precipitated England’s break from Rome, and ‘Martin’ is ...”

“... There might even be an inset, a small cameo of her in a neat shirtwaister, looking through the kitchen window, out onto a neat garden, thinking of something far away while she does the washing up. I mention these two puffs of fantasy to emphasise that I’m not attempting anything like a biography of Doris or Peter Lessing, still less my own ...”

“... we have this duty but I am puzzled by what exactly needs explanation. Chardin was a painter of the kitchen table with its coppers and onions and of the dessert table with its fruit and porcelain, and also of tranquil domestic scenes – children saying grace, contented servants preparing food, a lady taking tea. His still-lives (the term suits all his ...”

“... An ordinary kitchen. Gwen, a middle-aged wo­man, talks to the camera.He​  pulled up his trousers.‘You are nice to me,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t have shown it to anybody else.’I said, ‘Well, I hope you haven’t been doing.’‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Not much chance of that. No demand at the moment.’He’d come home from school looking a bit down and retreats upstairs to his room and doesn’t even bother to raid the fridge, by which I take it something’s amiss ...”

“... prone to the overstatement of youth but this is the real thing. The voice here is like that of Martin Amis, whose mark is all over this novel, not just in the muscular, shouldering prose style – the style of John Self – but in Ripley’s rich tangle of adolescent preoccupations, his Charles Highway-like obsession with bodily products (‘matutinal ...”

“... As Tobin tells it, the brothers were a pair of modest Midwestern visionaries, whose story – the kitchen-sink improvisation, the dogged determination, the legendary triumph – illustrates the American Dream. Their efforts and achievements seem to belong to a lost era of entrepreneurial innocence. The Wright Brothers were heavily researched even before the ...”

“... sign, but had no idea what it meant.) I’d grown up during the civil rights movement, had heard Martin Luther King speak. And here was an African-American who had risen higher than any non-white person in any Western country, and moreover had done so in a nation that has never, with the exception of the Irish John Kennedy, elected a president from even its ...”

“... new book, Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism and the Battle to Control Haiti (St Martin’s Press, £24.99), analyses America’s sordid manipulation of that election, which brought the corrupt – but pro-US – Martelly to power, as well as the 2016 election of Moïse, Martelly’s chosen successor. At the time of Moïse’s assassination ...”

“... Growing up in Cookstown in County Tyrone, I would occasionally wonder what it would be like to be Martin McGuinness’s son. He was infamous for being Sinn Féin’s number two, and for being the officer commanding of the Derry brigade of the IRA, a position he assumed, as he recently admitted, in February 1972. He was born the same year as my mother, and my parents used to live in Londonderry ...”