“... characters bodies at all, or can’t make up their minds about them: Emma Bovary’s eyes are black in one chapter, in other chapters brown or blue. Lionel Shriver rarely lingers over physical descriptions, with one great exception: she’s highly conscious of how much her characters weigh. Her most famous novel, We Need to Talk about Kevin, is arranged ...”

“... prominent writers were associated with, or at least publicly supportive of, Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. I could name names, but then I’d be naming names. What about signatories to an open letter requesting that Obama pardon Edward Snowden? I spoke on the phone this afternoon to the guy who wrote it. Was the FBI listening? Probably not, but at ...”

“... Ofqual’s way of dealing with public opinion was to hire a PR firm run by former associates of Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings, in a contract awarded without a process of competitive tendering.When the A level results were published on 13 August, 39 per cent of teacher-predicted grades had been revised downwards. The resulting furore – including a ...”

“... Ionce​ drove to Forest Lawn Memorial Park. It was before Michael Jackson had his crypt there, but I remember finding Walt Disney’s grave and that of Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore. A few writers are there too: Theodore Dreiser, who wrote well about department stores in Sister Carrie, and Clifford Odets, who believed shopping was one of America’s chronic diseases ...”

“... immortality on anyone who drinks from it. Two prophets with blazing haloes are seen against a black background, examining a fish that has been revived by the water. Alexander looks on from a distance. The legends tell of various mishaps that prevented the water from reaching his lips, condemning him to an early death.These voyages into the unknown promote ...”

“... by the head of serials, Jonathan Powell, produced by the Birmingham regional drama head, Michael Wearing, and scheduled before Martin had finished the scripts. Third, as a result of its plural structure, the department had gained and kept its reputation as a producer-led, oppositional space, not just for Edge of Darkness, but for Alan Bleasdale’s ...”

“... naive argument that he might not say such-and-such about absolute freedom in America if he were black. An incredulous pause, a bulge in the vinous features and then the outraged roar, ‘But I’m not black, yer daft booger!’ Fond, perhaps over-fond of recalling his days as a working-class Yorkshire socialist lad, he ...”

“... Channel 4 on 28 August, which showed autopsy footage of aliens who crashed in New Mexico in 1947, Michael Moore’s TV Nation described the Jerusalem Syndrome, which affects a similar kind of banana, in a different kind of way. Visitors to the Holy City dress up as characters from the Bible and stay on in town waiting for the end of the world. ‘The Lord ...”

“... government. However unfair to John Major it might be, as an electoral burden Iraq isn’t Black Wednesday. The Tories did well in the local elections, but not spectacularly well. More interesting is their performance in opinion polls. Although they are polling above their general election level, the difference is slight. Given the workings of the ...”

“... vignettes like Chatwin’s, humorous and on occasion startling. The best of them are memorable. Michael Ignatieff watches Chatwin ‘like an old baboon’ under a mulberry tree in the south of France, having his hair combed by his wife. The ravenous Francis Wyndham and James Fox spoon up a pitifully notional soufflé made from wild strawberries which they ...”

“... believed him to be at fault, as in his personal attitude towards official and public reactions to Michael Fagan’s invasion of the Queen’s bedroom. Already, after Lord Mountbatten’s murder, McNee, with the approval of the Palace and the Home Secretary, had appointed a working party of his own senior officers to review current policy and practice for the ...”

“... spent almost entirely in food and prayer, and remembrance of things past.’ When he chances on a black lawyer violently opposed to Nkrumah, the man is ‘obviously a Girondin of the most property and class-conscious kind’, while a frustrated teacher near Kumasi is ‘like the young Russian intellectuals in the novels of Turgenev’. Thomas belonged to the ...”

“... group of people, and if, in a nightclub, you bumped into someone with a gigantic 16-inch, charcoal-black conk, it by no means meant that they had anything to do with the music industry … pejoratively, the press started to call young groups ‘haircut bands’.Not the least important of these self-conscious funsters was a band from Beckenham called Haircut ...”

“... without the other. Those who have both will find that, among contemporaries, Christopher Reid and Michael Hofmann are classified as love poets but Craig Raine and Tony Harrison as blue versifiers. Only a few poets make both, including Seamus Heaney, who has two poems unworthy of him in the Whitworth (one about unfreezing a vaginal pump, one about a ...”

“... politically dynamic sequence of intersecting discursive practices’. I bet he drinks Carling Black Label. Of the position papers, the most confidently stimulating is Alan Sinfield’s essay on dramatic reworkings of Shakespeare, which awards two cheers to Charles Marowitz, none to Stoppard. The only solidly informative piece, though, is Ann Thompson’s ...”