“... In November​ 2024, London’s annual Mid-Century Modern fair celebrated its 21st anniversary in Christison Hall, a light, airy, wood and concrete ceremonial space in the grounds of Dulwich College. Here you could shop for Panton, Knoll or Eames chairs, World Expo posters or fabrics by Lucienne Day, and leaf through a range of zines, maps and books, while the building around you radiated optimism and repose ...”

“... and pausing at the Iron Age fort on Battlesbury Hill, which looks out over the British army’s Wiltshire estate. Since then most of the army in Afghanistan had come back to Britain, and an item of furniture had been added to the Battlesbury ramparts, among the cow parsley and purple clover: a bench. I was glad to sit down, as my pack was heavy. But the ...”

“... as if in that moment – but only in that moment – it could neutralise their sting. It’s nice to think of your father hiding himself away because he was playing with toys, and not because he was a manic depressive, as Arthur proved to be. Nicer to be invited to join a conspiracy than to discover only after his death that your father had treasured ...”

“... This is a common enough tactic for politicians battling to stay on message, but in Corbyn’s case it reflects an abiding set of concerns to which he returns repeatedly. What we notice with him is not usually a change in content, but in tone. When in a good mood, he exhibits a good-natured, smiling patience, taking a breath before explaining, yet ...”

“... Christmas because I was reading the greatest book I’ve ever read: the jazz musician Art Pepper’s 1979 autobiography Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper. It knocked my former top pick – Clarissa – right out of first place. As Art himself might say, my joint is getting big just thinking about it. I realise there may be a few lost souls who’ve never ...”

“... themselves had titles like ‘Working for the State: Public Service or Gravy Train?’, ‘India’s Future: Slumdogs or Millionaires?’ So much stuff, so much Horrible Histories alliteration, so many dispiritingly either-or questions: out of 74 ...”

“... 2 January. Catching up on the literary round-ups at the year’s end I’m struck as so often by how cantankerous the world of literature is, and how smarmy, both backbiting and back-scratching much more so than the theatre or show business generally ...”

“... any acts of terrorism. After all, terrorism is for the individual by far the modern world’s most effective form of political action, and climate change is an issue about which people feel just as strongly as about, say, animal rights. This is especially noticeable when you bear in mind the ease of things like blowing up petrol stations, or vandalising ...”

“... It’s time​  for the police to stop virtue-signalling and start catching robbers and burglars,’ the home secretary, Suella Braverman, said at the Conservative Party Conference last autumn. ‘More PCs, less PC.’ It’s not surprising that the government’s most committed culture warrior would use her speech to launch an attack on wokery ...”

“... crowd in perpetual motion, oysters at midnight, and all of it ‘bounded to the south by London’s dark blood stream, the Thames’. The book (a modest 234 pages) was anecdotal, speculative, inhabited. There was something going on. The past blistered seductively like the golden skin on a good Welsh rarebit. The project was a live one, working hard, after ...”

“... cities (the Hacienda in Manchester and ‘Cream’ in Liverpool being the two clearest examples). So much has changed that the leading lights in dance music – especially top DJs – who were once considered outsiders in the music business have become a new establishment, holding on determinedly to their powerful positions but ripe for removal; like those ...”

“... to original chaos of mud water fire and air. Morning and evening its one soak and the sun’s more or less a sponge, and lately comes up frozen quite stiff.This love of chaos, motion, process, which is the energy of his best poems, and often makes them resemble action paintings, is brought to a halt by the strong stresses on the last three words ...”

“... Apartheid Museum in South Africa bears witness to the racist system that dominated that country’s history; monuments and plaques outside the constitutional court in Johannesburg recognise those who suffered. There is no remotely comparable memorial culture in the United States to the legacy of slavery. ‘Only through grappling with this difficult past can ...”

“... My​ military career was on the comic side.’ Self-protective irony was Ian Watt’s chosen register when describing his wartime experience some twenty years later. That experience began when the 24-year-old Lieutenant Watt was posted, along with the rest of the 5th Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment, to the Far East in the winter of 1941 ...”

“... form of environmentalist anti-capitalism. In Ecology of Freedom (1982), he argued that man’s destruction of the environment is the result of his domination of other men, and only by doing away with all hierarchies – man over woman, old over young, white over black, rich over poor – could humanity avert ecological and economic collapse. In The Rise ...”