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“... Murdoch, most of it at some deep level boring because it is so much on one side or the other. William Shawcross surprised and disappointed many of his admirers by coming out as a big Murdoch fan in his 1992 biography. Bruce Page’s recent work, The Murdoch Archipelago, is as badly written as any book I have ever read, and is full of sentences which ...”

“... of reading the memoir of his friend Christopher Buckley, son of the conservative commentator William Buckley. Hitchens discovers a line he particularly likes, about ‘bringing to life a circuit that will spare the republic’, but is horrified to realise that it comes from the address of his arch-nemesis, Henry Kissinger, at Buckley’s memorial ...”

“... nude in bright light, with the red-shirted painter seen in a mirror – it looks oddly like one of William Orpen’s sunlight-in-the-studio pictures. In 1904 there was an exhibition at Vollard’s. Vollard and Matisse were about the same age and, as Spurling puts it, ‘both great gamblers’, although ‘neither could give the other the secure base each had ...”

“... of his professors. Thomas Pynchon is in the kitchen, opening a can of expired tuna with his teeth. William Gaddis is in the den, reading ticker-tape off a version of C-Span that watches the senators go to the bathroom. Don DeLillo is three houses down, having sex with his wife. I’m not going to begrudge him a wish that the world was full of these wonderful ...”

“... the marketplace off against the sophisticated abstraction of ‘cognisance’. Realism,​ Julian Barnes says, is ‘essentially corrective’, and if you ask what Browning’s realism seeks to correct the answer is rather peculiar: it is the idea that the world is same-old-same-old. The beautifully poised way that Browning deploys the very word ...”

“... a time, she was ‘the most shoplifted female author in the world’. She bought places to live in Barnes, Islington, Brighton, East 12th Street in Greenwich Village: at one point she was paying for three homes at the same time. ‘Oh sure, we all look glam while travelling,’ she said to a friend, ‘we’re good at media images.’ But as she wrote in her ...”

“... best short stories, he was attending Mass regularly. In The Sun Also Rises the protagonist, Jake Barnes, makes clear on a train through France, when the Catholics have taken all the seats for lunch, that he is a Catholic too. On arrival in Pamplona, he sees the cathedral and goes inside and, in one of Hemingway’s finest passages, with the prose fresh and ...”

“... of rock.’) The students in the audience would have had memories of the Conservative Party under William Hague, who led it to defeat in 2001; his successor, the tragi-farcical Iain Duncan Smith, who lasted until November 2003; and Michael Howard, who stayed on after losing a third general election in 2005 in order to oversee an extended leadership ...”