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“... the talent for comedy revealed in her letters. Staying in Rye with Alec Vidler, former dean of King’s College, Cambridge, who was helping her with research for The Knox Brothers, she described the house party to her daughter: a trendy cleric, his dull wife, a long-skirted daughter, going up to read English at Hertford, who evidently hadn’t wanted to ...”

“... chiefs of staff took very different approaches to the role of counsellor. Timothy, the philosopher-king of blue-collar Conservatism, hoped to reposition the Tories as a statist national party working in the interests of all classes, not just the fortunate haves. Hill was more intuitive and less wordy. But on one thing they concurred: the role of favourite ...”

“... cartoonist Nick Drnaso, arrives midway through a story – one of six – called ‘The Lil’ King’. A boy sits outside a locked motel room as rhythmic groans emanate from the other side of the door: his parents have stolen a moment alone, thinking the kids are at the pool. It is the last family road trip before his older sister goes away to ...”

“... is deployed in a more realist setting, and more relentlessly. Reading it, I was reminded of David Shields’s remark that with most conventional novels, ‘you have to read seven hundred pages to get the handful of insights that were the reason the book was written.’ Here the key term is, once again, ‘the future’, a quantity that the ...”

“... logistics, finance, real estate, technology, entertainment and pharmaceuticals. Bezos is the king of logistics and technology; the queen of logistics, the Walmart heiress Ann Walton, owns the largest US-built motor yacht since the 1930s, Aquila. Yacht-owners on the East Coast include hedge fund managers and real estate tycoons and berth their boats in ...”

“... Show, Married with Children, Fight Club, The Full Monty, Ally McBeal, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, King of the Hill, Titanic. We can usually think of one or two of these at the same time, but the sheer extent of Murdoch’s businesses is so vast that it is hard to hold them in the mind simultaneously. When his wife Anna filed for divorce and was asked the ...”

“... miners at the industry’s peak. Landlordism is the closest thing we have to a national industry. King Charles is a private landlord. John Lewis is a private landlord. The homelessness charity St Mungo’s is a private landlord. So are many MPs and, as Ruby found out, doctors.Landlordism has proliferated in tandem with soaring land and property values. A ...”

“... decades after 1945. The first is the dream of the social-democratic equivalent of the philosopher-king. This expresses the hope that even in contemporary mass democracies a figure will emerge who can work the political machine and at the same time embody intellect, sensibility and liberal values, someone who can win power and then exercise it in the name of ...”

“... group and Hillary Clinton, the case for a straightforward National Health Bill was put by Dr David Himmelstein. As he recalls the exchange:It was evident Hillary was thinking a lot about politics. Can you realistically tell me, she asked, that there are any big powers that support ‘single payer’ and that can take on the insurance industry’s ...”

“... to fabricate a first bomb,’ and eight or nine kilograms for subsequent ones. According to David Albright, one of the best and most reliable independent experts, ‘the most credible worst-case estimate’ is that the North may have between 6.3 and 8.5 kg of reprocessed plutonium. In other words, the CIA’s educated guess, endlessly repeated in the ...”

“... thanks to propaganda campaigns spearheaded by Bullingdon Club toffs like Boris Johnson and David Cameron, underwent significant revision. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the horse path alongside the Regent’s Canal was mud, and forbidden to pedestrians and cyclists alike, I rode to my gardening job in Limehouse on a market wreck bought for ...”

“... developed in America, and Jamaican sound systems had served Britain’s black communities with Nat King Cole, calypso and early forms of reggae. In Britain, by 1960 La Discothèque had opened in Wardour Street, and clubs such as the Place in Hanley and the Plaza in Manchester had instituted disc-only sessions. In the early Sixties the demand for such sessions ...”

“... Dr Rabelais thinks of real men in real wars, a ‘tyrant’ such as Charles V, who ransomed the King of France, is condemned and the once-comic figures who egged Picrochole on are treated as ‘seditious’ (a sin as well as a crime) and made to toil in the printing-presses; the wounded are nursed back to health. Rabelais came to see joyful laughter as a ...”

“... Tate) and Lady Catherine (1804, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland); William Turner and Sir David Brewster (inventor of the kaleidoscope) were frequent guests; on his solitary rides in the Lakes he often called on De Quincey (then editor of the Westmorland Gazette), and visited William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, whom Andrew describes in a letter ...”

“... and acts as mediator between his interests and those of the staff. In Fleet Street, the editor is king – so long as he has the king-maker behind him. In such circumstances, he is the final arbiter of what gets into the paper and what is kept out; of how to treat a particular story or article; and in shaping editorial ...”