“... Both contemptuously reject the view, which seemed supreme after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and what used to be known (quite wrongly) as Communism, that the world is now set fair on a course to libertarian capitalist prosperity. Instead of the torch of freedom, Klein writes, ‘it seems that it may be the torch of authoritarianism that is being ...”

“... down at the office: ‘I see that Mr Larkin’s got one of them swastika things up on his wall now. Whatever next?’ Next was a snip in the shape of some cardboard coffins that Sydney had cannily invested in and which came in handy when Coventry got blitzed, the Nazi insignia down from the wall by this time (a ...”

“... Patrick McGinley’s pastoral parable, The Red Men, begins with Gulban Heron, rural overlord of a hotel, a shop and four sons. There is dark-haired Jack, capable, ruthless, dissolute, his father’s favourite, and there are three carrot-polled losers, the red men of the title: Cookie, a jaded man of letters, typically apt to give life a literary form and content; cynical Joey, with his fire-scarred face, who mistrusts the emotions and gives his mind to geology and shopkeeping; and Father Bosco, with his fire-damped soul, reminiscently plagued by lust and distressed by the loneliness of his calling ...”

“... or half-awoke, to what they had done. Ever since the preceding Republican Convention in 1992, when Patrick J. Buchanan had made his fulminant speech about race war and culture war, the line of the prestige columnists and commentators had been that such a farouche gathering had lost the election for the GOP. This was a stupid line: nothing (certainly not a ...”

“... campaign five years ago, the equanimity (if not relish) with which Brexiter economists such as Patrick Minford contemplated the possibility that Brexit might mean the disappearance of British agriculture and the British motor industry was regarded with horror.Not any more. Farming is now regarded as politically expendable, even by the Conservative ...”

“... Stephen Wall sees as crucial those passages in An Autobiography where Trollope rhapsodises on his equality with the personages of his fiction: ‘There is a gallery of them, and of all in that gallery I may say that I know the tone of voice, and the colour of the hair, every flame of the eye, and the clothes they wear ...”

“... over by Joseph Kennedy, a fabulously successful self-made father with connections in Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington and London, and by Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, a devout but fashionable Catholic mum, as at home on the golf links or the ski slopes as in Windsor Castle. After making millions in banking, real estate and film distribution, the father wants ...”

“... the new Chinese regime and had played a leading part in securing the Geneva Accords. It was, as Patrick Wright puts it, ‘one of the last occasions, only two years before the Suez crisis, on which Britain exerted a decisive influence on international politics’. Zhou began to employ a ‘come and see’ strategy, inviting Western delegations to visit the ...”

“... how intemperate passions are rooted in a heavy loam of the commonplace and the customary. In Carn, Patrick McCabe describes three decades in the life of a small Irish community. Carn is a small town situated half a mile from the Irish border, a town honoured in Republican annals for the heroism of Commandant Matt Dolan, shot dead in 1922 during a raid on the ...”

“... the story of a Parisian rake in pursuit of an elusive scent (a vein mined far more rigorously in Patrick Süskind’s Perfume) alternates with a frankly embarrassing stream-of-consciousness monologue about a drugged rock musician living in mid-Seventies London. Neither of these adds much to Calvino’s glory: especially since, given their simultaneous ...”

“... Ruins of Detroit’ at www.detroityes.com). Hitler had a photo of Henry Ford on his office wall; some people attribute the industrial systems of the death camps to Ford’s influence. In 1957 the GM President declared: ‘What’s good for General Motors is good for America, and vice versa.’ The postwar scheme to span the US with concrete was ...”

“... art’ or pastiche: not until now, though, has it happened to the comic, which in the light of Patrick McCabe’s torrential and compelling The Butcher Boy is eminently suited to such treatment. Consider the Beano, for example, a series of moral tales repeated in only slightly modified form week after week. In a very simple way comics are about crime and ...”

“... old and big and always in the dark. Just over twenty miles away from our coastal New Town of wall-heaters and bin-cupboards, it was the place where we were all born. Glasgow sounded like granda to me; I was sure they were one and the same. I sometimes went back to the picture, and I got to know a little more as time went by. He was missing. I’d never ...”

“... of the so-called Jazz Age, crammed with bright young things enjoying a hop and a skip before the Wall Street Crash of 1929. His suggestion is that the times were more political: less cocaine, more coal-face; less hangover, more pit-closure. The defining moment, he argues, was not the Crash, but the General Strike of 1926, and the unstill centre was not the ...”

“... Bryan Carsberg of Oftel smiles up in soft brown light as he dangles in the mirror on a green office wall. Michael Meyer of Emess Lighting is dissected by the blinds that cut across him and then reassembled from outside – his shirtsleeved figure looming like a target in the formulaic eye of some Hollywood assassin ...”