“... a long flight to Jakarta. ‘Eric Lustbader?’ suggested Sean, and I shook my head. I’d seen Michael Herr sending dispatches. The hours flew by. The Beach is studded with non-cinematic references to popular culture of the same Eighties vintage: Atari and Nintendo video games, Airfix models, Tintin and Asterix, David Attenborough’s Life on ...”

“... Major was again in the right place, as the only plausible Thatcherite contender who could beat Michael Heseltine. Whether Thatcher really thought him the right man to succeed her was now beside the point, though it became a matter of continuing recrimination. The ambiguity in Major’s position at first helped him. ‘I am not running as son of Margaret ...”

“... Diana’s death and funeral was to keep up this pose while rescuing the Palace from the spectre of black republicanism, in the face of both a snarling press and a po-faced sovereign who couldn’t see what the fuss was about. By the end of the week, though, Number Ten had convinced even Her Majesty that without a sop to sentiment this could be the Big One, and ...”

“... but the harm and suffering that one inflicts upon oneself.’ The narrator centres her lecture on Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, in which a repressed piano teacher, Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert), is pursued by a ‘cocky and dashing student’. She proposes a sadomasochistic scenario, is rejected as ‘repugnant’ and then stabs herself in her ...”

“... America started arriving at Fort Gulick in Panama for training in counterinsurgency. According to Michael McClintock’s scrupulously documented Instruments of Statecraft (1992), over the next two decades 45,000 Latin Americans, including the future leaders of various coups and juntas, graduated from Fort Gulick. The US army also sent mobile training teams to ...”

“... David Hare, the Anglo-Portuguese poet and teacher Henry Derozio, the great Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt. If Kipling had been born fifty years earlier, it would have been impossible for him to write the cheerfully assonantal but bleak lines: ‘O East is East, and West is West/And never the twain shall meet!’ It would have been equally ...”

“... critic.’ A few years later Styron wrote about his bout with what Churchill called ‘the black dog’ in a memoir, originally published in Vanity Fair, called Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990). It was an instant bestseller with staying power. ‘Curious to think that a slender little volume about lunacy may provide a meal ticket for my ...”

“... focal points for grief.’ The fallen of King’s Cross are uniformly capitalised: a plain design, black on grey. Memorials are small incidents of civic amnesia, a way of letting go. If you place such a thing on a high wall, nobody sees it. I’d worked, years ago, shifting sacks of Christmas mail, at Liverpool Street, King’s Cross and St Pancras, but I had ...”

“... the broken link of an earlier orbital fantasy. This border is marked by a permanent pall of thick black smoke. Urban walkers perk up; we’re back in the shit. The noise. The action. The situation, at the junction of the North Circular and the Lee Valley Trading Estate, is readable. It’s what we are used to, what we advocate; faux Americana, waste ...”

“... a cartoon or an illustration dated 1942, entitled ‘Gobbling Market’ and meant as a satire on black marketeers. It was for Punch but it could just as easily have been for Der Stürmer, as all the black marketeers are strongly semitic in features, some as demonic as in the worst Nazi propaganda. The expert makes no ...”

“... was the cohesion of a unified settler state in the wake of the American Revolution. Far more than Black slavery, the Native question was central to the reordering of political loyalties on the eastern seaboard. From the vantage of the American colonials, the Indians were, as the historian Colin Calloway has put it, paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, ‘the ...”

“... here. ‘But,’ piped up the intellectual, ‘of course it’s true that the anti’s, led by Michael Foot, are completely antediluvian.’ Crossman had by this time come to terms with the fact that, as he had noted in 1952, what the Labour Party ‘really can’t abide is thrashing out Socialist policy among themselves. It is this solidarity which keeps ...”

“... at Henley and John Outram’s Isle of Dogs pumping-house. It stretches to high technology in Michael Hopkins’s stand at Lord’s cricket ground and to eclectic neo-vernacular in Jeremy Dixon’s crow-stepped-gabled housing in Docklands. Among the targets for the Prince’s brickbats are London’s Royal Free Hospital, most new building in the City of ...”

“... concerned middle classes and the greens. Throw in women (end ‘the culture of masculinity’), black people (‘Labour didn’t listen’), the Irish (‘troops out’) and a good dose of anti-Americanism (Europe has been ‘made in the USA’), and the coalition is complete. Labour is ready to win. There is something fetching about the simplicity of ...”

“... to know the truth drives him on in the face of orders to abandon it. He has stumbled on a black secret of the Reich which, if spilled, could put an end to all talk of a détente with America. As he pursues his investigation, taking more and more risks but getting away with them, you begin to think that the evil old state founded on denunciation and ...”