“... Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, which whammed him from every angle. (Styron, reading the galleys, goes down the checklist: ‘I’m a racist, a distorter of history, a defamer of black people, a traducer of the heroic image of “our” Nat Turner.’) Sophie’s Choice, published in 1979, was a more calculated risk, the non-Jewish author ...”

“... to list. But it will delight the Sun and the Daily Mail which is its intention. 27 January. A reading of the new draft of The History Boys at the NT Studio gets off to a bad start when half the cast are found to be reading from a first draft and the rest from the revised version. It’s a scratch round-up of whoever’s ...”

“... possession of competencies and techniques that are now obscure. Today the kind of food-letters in Peter Binoit’s Still Life with Letter Pastries (c.1615) – a pretzel-like ‘P’, ‘R’ and ‘B’ next to a silver plate of capon and olives – don’t carry much cultural capital (alphabet spaghetti at your dinner party?), but in the 17th century such ...”

“... account of English high society in the last five cantos of Don Juan frequently comes to mind when reading Pückler’s account of its more rigid or frigid lords and ladies, and the relaxed culture of the country house. But in some significant passages his vision is strongly coloured by German Romanticism. No ecclesiastical building still in use impresses him ...”

“... a hole, laid down some perforated cardboard over it, and ‘selected a favourite picture’. ‘Peter turned around. I got down on the ground, checked to see if he was looking, took my dick out of my trousers, and fucked the wet black hole.’ Around the same age I also bought copies of the Sun with my friends, as well as the Star and the People. It may ...”

“... of a major new artist’, but the Observer sees nothing but ‘duff bravura and blank poise’. Peter Fuller, editor of Modern Painters, fears for the hyped Conroy. The Times Literary Supplement: a ‘sinister portent’. The Financial Times critic describes the paintings with care, but fetches up with ‘a scumbled emptiness’. The Tablet concedes ‘a ...”

“... the real purpose of the UN Resolutions, then where does that leave our Modern Empiricists, our Peter Jenkinses and Hugo Youngs, our Edward Mortimers and Gerald Kaufmans and Paddy Ashdowns? Their ‘practical approach’, their faith in the ‘cock-up theory of history’, their insistence that political events must be judged as they come, each by ...”

“... frightened men, their obsession with the surface of femininity, and their lack of women.’ After reading this essay and (for example) the essay on Pollock, it wasn’t clear to me why it mattered, in terms of Berger’s notions of painting, whether a painting is thought to cling to the surfaces of things or to offer those surfaces as intimations of the ...”

“... cool, all those dancing lessons, all culminating, two hundred years later, in nonsense like Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract, with all the while the bitter reality of the taxman, the press-gang, the whore, the rope, the dead child, the waste, the stolen apple. And all those books, about all those things. Madness. It’s a moot point as ...”

“... and Spender and his then wife Inez, were Auden and Isherwood, their new boyfriends, and Peter Pears as co-host with Britten. The stickiness – clearly a source of great amusement to Coldstream and Spender – lay in the tensions between the lifestyles of the people concerned, and the frustration felt by Auden and Isherwood – naturally dominant ...”

“... in which simple images have replaced ideas and argument has been supplanted by razzmataz. On this reading, Margaret Thatcher must rank as the premier who has hastened the reduction of the democratic process to the level of show-business. The writers’ tone is journalistic, and not always far removed from that of some of those whom they deride. However, their ...”

“... Tory MPs like Julian Amery (originally seen helping Zog in Albania), Winston Churchill and Peter Temple-Morris deliver themselves of staggeringly banal pronouncements. In spite of some of them going on ‘fact-finding’ missions to the Middle East, they are as ill-informed and full of poor advice on their return as they were before. Even worse, when ...”

“... contemptuous of the project even after the filming had started. Michael Gill and his co-producer, Peter Montagnon, have painful memories of a luncheon they and their team were given when they did some filming at Saltwood. Jane announced loudly that the Queen Mother had lunched there the week before and left a handsome tip for the servants, so the price of ...”

“... and tribal’ in their campaign against AV seems to have surprised Clegg, although a quick reading of any history of the Conservative Party would have enlightened him. Furthermore, his primary and endlessly repeated defence of the coalition (that it has to clear up the terrible mess left behind by Labour), though not completely untrue, contains a large ...”

“... is unable to grasp the reality of the conflict. According to the German literary historian Peter de Mendelssohn, My First Wife is ‘exactest, most scrupulous autobiography’, ‘authentic to the last detail’. But it’s hard to shake off the impression that Ganna-Speyer is Wassermann-Herzog’s creation: it isn’t just books and class that have ...”