“... become less and less answerable to their members. Taxation has become more progressive, but the black economy has flourished. The savage, unregulated market of the 19th century has been tamed, but it has become increasingly clear that the tamers themselves now need taming. The central discovery of the founding fathers of social democracy was that the ...”

“... original bodies remain: one fossil recovered from north-eastern Russia was coated with a thin black layer less than a thousandth of a millimetre thick. In 2018, scientists used mass spectrometry to analyse the layer, revealing the carbon skeletons of cholesterol-like molecules. If these conclusions are correct, Dickinsonia would count among the earliest ...”

“... say. Then there is a white girl, who could be from anywhere between Moscow and San Francisco; a black boy, probably from Africa, possibly Birmingham; a Malay or Indonesian boy; another boy who I think is South American, but don’t hold me to it, he could be an Arab; and a girl I can say with assurance is one of a billion or so Chinese. All have charming ...”

“... in courtrooms: a claim proved to be false within a matter of days. There was also a certain black comedy in the fact that the girl who had lied about being a lawyer should be attacked two days later, in the same papers, by Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard professor of law, who happened to be visiting Australia. I met Jill Kitson on the morning his article ...”

“... up years ago – and because of it too: the pace of change has picked up since then. The mayor, Michael Bloomberg, sometimes talks about the importance of tourism to New York as if tourists were more important to the city than its inhabitants, but when you consider that 44 million tourists visited the city last year – an increase of 25 per cent since 2001 ...”

“... of the opposition was in hiding, in exile or dead. He was greeted at the hotel by crowds of angry black-shirted squadristi – armed fascist squads – who threatened him and smashed windows, demanding that he leave town. He was lulled into accepting the ‘protection’ of a local fascist leader, Carlo Scorza, but after being driven away he was viciously ...”

“... pictures, statues, vineyards, the Italian sky, dark-eyed peasants, opera-music, Raphael and old Michael, ‘Childe Harold’, the ‘Marble Faun’, ‘Romola’, and ever so many more ingredients, – the whole having I think taken me pretty well off my feet! Perhaps I ought to add Henry James. He has been perfectly charming to me for the last three ...”

“... easy But no one warned that the mind repeats In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still The black swan of trespass on alien waters. The lines echo the description by A.D. Hope – much revered by McAuley and Stewart – of Australia as  a vast parasite robber-state Where second-hand Europeans pullulate Timidly on the edge of alien shores but ...”

“... making: among other points he has established significant common ground between Burke and Marx. Mr Michael Freeman’s position in all of this is initially uncertain. The blurb seems to imply that he shows what a powerful case Burke makes for radicals to answer. But in fact Mr Freeman is much more interested in descriptive work than in recruiting the great ...”

“... interesting thing about the writer in question. Often, though, this invented self is a problem. Michael Wood’s oustandingly brilliant new book is in part a corrective to the public persona adopted by his subject. Wood calls this persona ‘Nabokov the mandarin’, and robustly describes it as ‘a set ... of ...”

“... swathes of British social policy. But that is because they are allowed to by politicians like Michael Howard. We do not know how effective as managers of opinion the tabloids are. On the one occasion when a politician (Stanley Baldwin) has seriously taken them on, the politician won hands down. What does not work is the attempt to anticipate the ...”

“... limited to a small but dedicated following among writers such as Richard Ford, Stewart O’Nan and Michael Chabon. This came ten years too late for Yates, who died of emphysema and complications following minor surgery in 1992. His fiction is closely modelled on his own experiences and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is a miserable place. The Easter Parade ...”

“... Celebration was concerned, modern ended in the 1930s. The future as defined by the brochure from Michael Eisner’s Disney Corporation was to be found not in Walt’s skyscrapers and monorails, but in a long-lost past of white picket fences and pastel dormer windows, so lost that perhaps it was entirely mythic: There was once a place where neighbours ...”

“... he joined the RAF and performed in Ralph Reader’s Gang Shows. Soon afterwards he teamed up with Michael Bentine, Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan to form The Goons: slightly wearing to listen to now (I suppose you had to be there at the time) but routinely credited with having ‘revolutionised British post-war comedy’ – unless that was Monty Python or ...”

“... in for a spot of incest and unmarried motherhood – in A Certain Justice we are even given a ‘black smudge of pubic hair’ – but they still feel more at home grousing about the lower orders or condemning as racist the charge that the Metropolitan Police Force is institutionally racist. One might define fiction as the kind of writing in which it is ...”