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“... Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A.P. Herbert recorded that. And it was ...”

“... boys from Glasgow, and what I remember most about them is the sheer depth of their wish to be remembered, not to fade into the shadows of a system they couldn’t properly see or understand. Sometimes I would meet them when I parked my bike at the edge of the playing fields; the boys were pale, nervous, often tearful, and they looked into the orange ...”

“... even as they held on stubbornly to ideas for years until the money and the creatives could be married and a film born.The back office deity of that era was the seven-times-married Robert Evans, who ran production at Paramount for a decade from 1966, when the studio made The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby. The ghost ...”

“... exactly what you’d expect of a Kingsley Amis title, but in another two years the old devil will be 70 and perhaps he is beginning to mellow. John McDermott remarks in his appealing study of Amis’s novels that the hero-as-shit, at large in a world of mutual animosity and obsessive self-interest, is one of their most characteristic figures. In The folks ...”

“... The nostalgia of Christine Brooke-Rose is, surprisingly, for a golden age of character in fiction; David Caute harks back to the Sixties and the heyday of radical hopes; John Fuller conjures a world in which stories can still enchant. But these novelists are all, in their respective ways, nervous about the power of fiction to enthrall, and they live on the ...”

“... European literature,’ wrote David Dabydeen in his essay ‘On not being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today’, ‘is littered with blacks like Man Friday, who falls to earth to worship Crusoe’s magical gun, or the savage in Conrad’s steamship.’ He could have added that American literature is too, from Uncle Tom to Nigger Jim to Porgy and Bess and Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury ...”

“... low-profile, best-selling author of some of the most remarkable historical fiction of the century. David Sweetman met Mary Renault in 1981, when he interviewed her for the BBC; he had been under the spell of her books since he read them as ‘an awkward, insecure teenager’. He brings to the art of biography a well-intentioned gentleness that is rare; but it ...”

“... Cup Final ...’ ‘When we had Huw Wheldon at the BBC ...’ ‘When we were first married ...’ David Hare calls the curators of these arcadias the ‘whenwes’. They guard their territory with a dogged devotion. Although the theatre is a medium that exists entirely in the present tense, it is not immune to the arcadian virus: ‘the National Theatre at ...”

“... decisiveness of history than this far corner of Lebanon from which he would, within three years, be driven even further away? Eight years later, in the Deheisha refugee camp on the occupied West Bank, David Grossman experienced a faintly similar phenomenon. He was listening to an old Palestinian woman remembering her ...”

“... are commonly brought up to show that the modernist impetus survived in the generation after Pound: David Jones, Anglo-Welshman; Basil Bunting, Northumbrian Englishman; and Hugh MacDiarmid, Lowland Scot. The claim for Jones seems the weakest: it is advanced by Jones’s admirers, not by the ...”

“... all Palestinian agencies including the Palestine Liberation Organisation (which is recognised by all Palestinians as representing their true political aspirations). At the same time, he brings to his work the discipline of a scholar. He is currently Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia and has written several books, among them ...”

“... naturalism’), and William James (‘an impassioned empiricism ... declaring the universe to be wild and young’). The Californian ‘humorists’ referred to by Santayana were the product, primarily, of a distinct historical phenomenon – the mining towns which sprang up during and after the Gold Rush of 1849. They ...”

“... How long​ do we have left, and how bad will it get? David Wallace-Wells opens his book with a short, sharp reality check: ‘It’s worse, much worse, than you think.’ All the news is bad. Marshalling research from across the sprawling field of climate studies, Wallace-Wells paints a picture of disastrous change on an almost incomprehensible scale ...”

“... business in the history of the media business. It exceeds in scope any of the empires assembled by the Hearsts, the Harmsworths and the Thomsons. Murdoch himself seems driven by insatiable ambition. He is never satisfied. Nothing appears complete, and the old man shows no sign of abandoning the struggle – especially as ...”

“... Much of the tale is conveyed by the covers. A sad, thoughtfully dithering photo of the prime minister fronts What Went Wrong, Gordon Brown? The cover of Christopher Harvie’s book features a cartoon from the Independent: an apocalyptic lightning flash strikes and anoints David Cameron, while Brown and Alistair Darling flee London as Parliament quakes against the background of a setting sun ...”