“... scatology a subversive weapon. Sometimes Newton’s pleasure seems merely ‘schoolboyish’ – David Alexander’s word – because what Crowninshield would later call the ‘grossness and somewhat fat overstatement’ overwhelm any political point. Not so, however, when Newton shows Napoleon Establishing French Quarters in Italy by having the Pope kiss ...”

“... peoples are structured in analogy with their own social organisations. The social bond is held in place in the following way: people converse; to comprehend each other they need shared categories; as these categories are the reflection of the social order, their very conversation confirms the formal ordering of their society. Later Durkheim’s study ...”

“... States.’ His popularity in the country, especially among Labour people north of the Trent, held up remarkably throughout much political misfortune and extended into his retirement. This was something which metropolitan comment tended to ignore. Wilson was an incorrigibly provincial man with the common touch, and that, I think, chiefly accounts for his ...”

“... itself. When Stephen Spender showed the Daily Express a friend’s letter about Burgess, he was held to have disgraced himself. This book is a great feat. Andrew Boyle went through archives and memoirs in two continents, but above all persuaded people to talk – people in the know, who had given out little or no information before. So much has been written ...”

“... William McGrath, and the notorious Kincora child abuse scandal. Although Tara has not been held responsible for terrorist outrages, many of the people who later became key figures in both the UDA and the UVF began their paramilitary careers there. The organisation is of particular interest because of McGrath’s close links with the British Israelites ...”

“... on the campaign-strategy and policy-planning groups and has also effectively resumed the job he held under Neil Kinnock as Communications Director, though his centre of operations has now moved to the Party’s new media headquarters at Millbank – ‘my Millbank’, as he likes to call it. It has become a Westminster cliché, echoed privately by the ...”

“... wrecking the economy? It looked hopeless. In his fine book The Rise and Fall of Apartheid (2009), David Welsh asked: ‘How could two such opposed organisations as the ANC and the NP ever hope to reach a constitutional settlement, given their respective histories, their radically different constitutional proposals, and a serious difference of opinion over the ...”

“... and it seemed inevitable that they would be tortured. The two defence counsel, George Bizos and David Soggot, brought in Kentridge and an urgent application, based on the evidence elicited from the prosecution witnesses, was made for injunctions forbidding the police to ill-treat them. The judge refused to treat the application as urgent, with the result ...”

“... of his family. After completing his degree he abandoned engineering to become an imam, and held posts at mosques in Denver, San Diego and Falls Church, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, where he was at the time of the attacks of 11 September 2001. He was by then becoming widely known for his preaching, circulated first on cassettes, then on CDs and ...”

“... of twice-told Beat tales, refers to Ginsberg’s historic undergraduate illumination as ‘hand-held’ – perhaps an allusion to a key detail in what he had said to me: the fact that an act of masturbation had triggered Blake’s phantasmal arrival in his East Harlem tenement flat. This account of the revelatory plunge into Godhead (‘the ceremony of his ...”

“... be accepted at the outset. Anyone – to be more specific, mountebanks like Daniel Goldhagen and David Cesarani – with not a lot to say, but with a will to dilate about atrocity, can extort a hearing for themselves. Others, with more to say, seem to have a clause in their contracts demanding that they mention it at least once in any article, be it on ...”

“... He’s invariably linked with a group of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not Don DeLillo; he’s the least ...”

“... became perfect modern exemplars for the likes of Camus, who saw in them a stoic refusal to be held back by the status quo. Men who behaved as if there was a point in trying to right wrongs, even if they knew the world better than that. Mostly, in the early 1960s, we sat passively in the dark, in oversized black sweaters and tight jeans, watching the ...”

“... the Paris Review, McSweeney’s and the New Yorker. He is also a journalist, specialising, like David Foster Wallace, in first-person-singular expeditions into curious reaches of American culture. Tower’s non-fiction adventures have included a bicycle odyssey along the New Orleans levee a year after Hurricane Katrina, a search for a possibly extinct ...”

“... a few of the larger, rather unrepresentative towns, like Oxford and Cambridge. The Conservatives held on with intact majorities to places like Swindon, Reading and Milton Keynes, where Labour had hopes. Suburban England, where the Lib Dems had been serious competition for the Tories, is now overwhelmingly Conservative. The party also won seats in towns with ...”