“... by love and sympathy, he says:Her immediate ‘face’ when she meets someone is too open & too nice – ‘smarmy’ as you said – but that’s the American stereotype she clutches at when she is in fact panic-stricken. Or perhaps – and I think this is more like it – her poise & brain just vanish in a kind of vacuous receptivity – only this ...”

“... for the Dauphiné but also a big supplier of timber and iron to the rapidly growing navy, with a nice sideline in textiles and sugar and also shares in the great colonial companies – quite a match for the Rockefellers and Musks of the modern era. Rather than ‘l’État, c’est moi,’ Daniel Dessert writes in his scorching demolition of the Colbert ...”

“... making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working’ – from an article by David Graeber for Strike! magazine about ‘bullshit jobs’. Productive jobs, he argues, have been automated away and replaced by administrative ones which masquerade as service: HR, PR, financial services, ancillary industries like dog-washing and all-night ...”

“... Afghan flatbread. They ate it in the car and joked together on the way to Portobello Road. It was nice the way Mr Jafari talked about everything, from girls to travelling the world. ‘I remember dropping him back home that night,’ Abdullah said. ‘He was old and he had diabetes so I used to take him right up to the door.’On the floor below the ...”

“... by rock stars, stylists and designers seeking ideas for sets and costumes on movies like the David Essex vehicle That’ll Be the Day. But McLaren grew tired of nostalgia, feeling ‘lost in dead tissue’ as he later put it, and increasingly frustrated by the small-mindedness of the Teddy Boy contingent. He and Westwood relaunched the shop as Too Fast ...”

“... chief lawyer for two decades, responsible for the technical drafts of the Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice, Constitutional and Lisbon treaties before his retirement in 2010. He is a stern judge of his own handiwork: expansion has robbed the EU of its coherence and identity; the Parliament has failed to win voters’ confidence; the Commission is intellectually ...”

“... black and white photographs that line the walls of the dining-room: Harold Wilson, Derek Nimmo, David Steel, Jeremy Irons, Clement Freud, Norman Tebbit, Barbara Castle, Elaine Paige, Cecil Parkinson, Nigel Lawson, Robin Day. It’s like being compulsorily inducted into a dinner party from hell, a nightmare mix of half-forgotten careerists and political ...”

“... ones that I really wrote from experience and not projecting myself into a situation and writing a nice story about it, which I always found phony’ – ‘third-person songs about people who lived in concrete flats and things’. The emphasis now is on a music that comes from the inside, no virtuosity, none of the courtesies of ‘projection’, no more ...”

“... in idiom and terminology than even Freud himself was able to be.’ ‘Was able’ is a very nice touch. Freud was doing what he could to be muddled, but couldn’t go all the way. The early New Penguin volumes contained lists of published and forthcoming titles in the series, but the recent volumes are mum about everything. Perhaps the series is, like ...”

“... his 35 years at Netherne. This led me, some months later, to an office in Lambeth belonging to David O’Flynn, a consultant psychiatrist at the Lambeth and Maudsley Hospitals, and chair of the Adamson Collection Trust. We walked up and down the corridors of the clinic where he worked and looked at the display of patients’ pictures on the walls (these ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... but the ship itself was realised by others. In Glasgow, John Robertson made the engine and David Napier the boiler, while John Wood in Port Glasgow built the wooden hull and installed the machinery. The result was a marvel, the prototype of a steamer fleet that would revolutionise travel on the Clyde by 1820, when two dozen of them sailed every day ...”

“... name?No, no. He wrote one book about Oxford and that was about it. But he was a thoroughly sweet, nice chap; he was very old. And he had the gift of being able to fall asleep and to wake up on the dot just as you finished. You could probably have read the same essay over and over every week – well, probably not. He probably had some subconscious way of ...”

“... support from celebrities, among them Rowan Williams, Emma Thompson, Grayson Perry, Noam Chomsky, David Byrne, David King (the former chief scientific adviser to the government) and Thunberg.Less well known is their following among lawyers, farmers (including livestock farmers), medics (last year the Lancet called for ...”

“... but also want to read about not-quite Tony Parsons’s head being burst to bits between copies of David Lodge’s Consciousness and the Novel and The History of Roget’s Thesaurus. Some of this can be put down to the impure nature of satire itself, which appeals almost exclusively to the dark side. Is there another genre that depends on a character flaw for ...”