“... the era of the art-house, the film-society circuit, film magazines and film schools began. Andrew Sarris launched the cult of the auteur. His key thesis was Citizen Kane: The American Baroque, in which he described Kane as ‘the work that influenced the cinema more profoundly than any American film since Birth of a Nation’. If you regarded film as ...”

“... with the broadcasting media. Ministers are now instructed not to talk to awkward interviewers like Andrew Neil or appear on shows with an alleged anti-government bias, like the Today programme. There are to be new restrictions on the parliamentary lobby’s access to briefings from the PM’s spokesperson, thus making it possible to freeze out unfavoured ...”

“... to enjoy a country girl called Sasha. It was a huge amount of information for an inexperienced young woman to absorb in a very short time with a crucial deadline pending. ‘I don’t think,’ Sonya wrote years later, ‘I ever recovered from the shock of reading the diaries … I can still remember … the horror of that first appalling experience of ...”

“... That book is fused with my being in a way that happens only with things encountered when one is young and growing like one of our hero’s magic trees. Even now, even as I find the book silly and boring and rather noisome (to use a word from J.R.R.’s special vocabulary), it still locks with my psyche in a most alarming way. There is suction, something ...”

“... Flannery O’Connor, Chinua Achebe, Georges Bernanos, Kate O’Brien, Maurice Gee, Brian Moore and Andrew O’Hagan, have made a big effort. Others, such as James Joyce, have managed to weave religion into a larger fabric, with all the sheer drama of faith and doubt, and have managed also to include the comic possibilities of dogma and ritual to liven up their ...”

“... the group’s best tunes, only to be pushed out for being a Beatles-loving middle-class namby.) Andrew Loog Oldham, who managed the Rolling Stones, was the crucial precursor in grasping that bad publicity was useful – something to be actively sought, even fabricated. But he hadn’t featured so prominently in the coverage of his clients as McLaren ...”

“... day, a necessary oasis, behaviour is increasingly strange. This morning a circle of around twenty young people were being instructed by their guru in how to place one foot in front of another – with awareness. Some were yawning, fresh from bed. Others frowned at the enormity of the task: divorce from their electronic devices. This was a deprogramming ...”

“... No lie, no British participation in the invasion. Oborne quotes Churchill’s reply in 1940 to a young rating on a battleship who asked him whether everything he told them was true: ‘Young man, I have told many lies for my country, and will tell many more.’ In wartime, and in sterling crises too, Oborne accepts that ...”

“... The boys worked together on a student newspaper and in student politics. His younger brother, Andrew, took time out from his own media career to work as an adviser to Gordon when he first became an MP. These were the relationships he cherished: permanent bonds with people who will look out for you regardless. The ones he mistrusted were those based on ...”

“... is melancholy to think that any village community should have rated the sacrifice of ardent young lives so low that it was held that their adequate commemoration was achieved by a cross of Cornish design and granite sold in various sizes by large department stores.’There was no English or imperial tradition of monumental memorials, no exemplars such ...”

“... they would leave the investors holding the bag. Appropriately, the financial forensics analyst Andrew Weissmann was among the first appointments Mueller announced. In November, a police raid on the Deutsche Bank offices in Frankfurt looked like another piece of the puzzle – especially if one recalled Mueller’s subpoena of the bank a year ...”

“... scholarly tasks of editing Milton and of compiling a student anthology of critical essays about Andrew Marvell, experiences that awoke him to the full horror of academic Lit Crit: ‘researching these two books made me resolve never to write such stuff myself, and to deride it whenever I came across it.’ Much of the introduction to the Marvell collection ...”

“... novels were selling strongly and being urgently discussed: one was lyrical and would-be Proustian (Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance); the other was bilious and aspired to satire (Larry Kramer’s Faggots). I disliked them both, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that gay literary culture had room for two such opposite productions, could ...”

“... Hickey has even asserted that Rockwell could feel no ‘instinctive identification’ with the young black girl whom he painted for Look in 1964, as she was escorted into a newly desegregated school, and blames his friends Erik Erikson and Robert Coles for brainwashing him into an interest in poverty programmes and civil rights. In the same issue of the ...”

“... One morning​ in Manchester, in November 2023, a young man went looking for a place to stay. He’d lost his job and couldn’t pay the rent on his flat. When he asked the council for advice, they told him to stay put. He did, until the bailiffs came and changed the locks. He slept rough in a train station. He was on drugs ...”