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“... 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 ...”

“... meringue,’ ‘Kay felt her face crumbling like a badly-made piecrust.’ We get the point. The kitchen rules, OK, even in the dirty bits, as when poor Joel is driven to desperate measures: ‘Maddened with frustration, he unzipped his trousers and shoved his erect penis into a carton of cream.’ (Well, to be sure, there’s a divinity that shapes our ...”

“... apartment had the standard LA wall-to-wall shaggy carpet and saloon-style doors into the ‘kitchen area’. Strolling the murky corridors of the apartment building, I could hear the sounds of daytime game-shows emanating from behind the closed doors of my reclusive neighbours; and occasionally I would glimpse a night-attired spectral figure gliding to ...”

“... so bombed out one day on barbiturates that while his girlfriend was preparing their lunch in the kitchen he passed out into the starter. Elvis is not a broad church: if you’re not fundamentalist then you’re indifferent. Uncle Vester, thus, is either another messenger at the shrine or another unfortunate chorus-sweller in the vaudeville farce we ...”

“... Dickens), and neither do most authors from roughly the second half of the 20th century onwards. Martin Amis is not M.L. Amis. Between these two periods, however, this largely male habit of self-designation spreads thick and fast: H.G., T.S., W.B., E.M., D.H., L.P., W.H. and so on. No doubt some doctoral student will one day explain why. Perhaps it has to do ...”