“... she was also put in the lowest grade, in her case 1G. Our parents were working-class and when I read in Todd’s book that ‘working-class children were likely to find themselves relegated to the lowest streams of grammar schools, regardless of their eleven-plus results,’ I was naturally disposed to agree. Then again, what evidence was there that my ...”

“... Reading Myself and Others. The Ghost Writer, ‘My True Story’, etc. In the preface to the last Peter Tarnopol solemnly announced that something truer than true was on its way: ‘Presently Mr Tarnopol is preparing to forsake fiction for a while and embark upon an autobiographical narrative, an endeavour which he approaches warily, uncertain as to both its ...”

“... state for Scotland, drove by in his motorcade: ‘This Scar Will Never Heal!’ one of the banners read. To this day, many Glaswegians would agree.In 2022 a London-based urban designer called Peter Kelly set up a campaign group called Replace the M8. Kelly believes there is a nostalgia for ‘the completeness of the ...”

“... are the quintessential sign behind shopping, browsing, culture-sampling and tourism. You might read the Home Office street front as an aspirational allegory. On ground level, we are supplied with nature, the raw stuff of the world. Over that, we impose our urban grids, our political structures. Yet, ultimately, we reach up towards ‘quality’, a je ne ...”

“... that Locke is the nation’s founding philosopher-grandfather: ‘Oh, I know Locke! I think we read his Second Treatise in school. He’s the small government, life, liberty, property guy, right?’ It’s widely assumed that Locke’s political philosophy fed a ‘continuous stream of American political thought’ from the 18th century to the ...”

“... even Neville Chamberlain might have blushed. We learn this not from Blair’s memoirs, but from Peter Mandelson’s, which provide a much more complete account of the Blair/Brown relationship (they are also much easier to read, since Mandelson has no problem telling his story in chronological order).* Mandelson reveals ...”

“... Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, allowed his head of information, Collette Bowe, to read out to the Press Association a letter from the Solicitor-General to the selfsame Secretary of State for Defence (Michael Heseltine). Neither the Solicitor-General nor Heseltine knew of the leak. The letter, like the document about the Cruise missiles ...”

“... the merit, from Le Carré’s point of view, of being pretty well impossible to follow unless you read the book). Smiley’s People is a sequel to Tinker Tailor, and it stars Alec Guinness as Smiley, supported by a number of other characters you will now be able to put a television face to. So all that couldn’t be better and probably was set up (not ...”

“... Studies at Birmingham University as a model for the future, though prospective applicants who read Michael Green’s vulnerable and tedious account of the Centre’s procedures are likely to think again. One contributor – the hapless Easthope – prefers oral poetry to ‘official written poetry, high cultural poetry’, another wants critical ...”

“... few months after his death, is a cautionary tale. Belloc might have called it ‘Ganna Mevis, who read too much and ruined her marriage’. The fifth of the six daughters of haute-bourgeois Viennese parents – an academic and his wife – Ganna is rarely without a book. She takes Nietzsche on picnics, reads Hölderlin as she makes pancakes, has a group of ...”

“... by V.A. Gatrell, B. Lenman and G. Parker (Crime and the Law); to the implications of the work of Peter Laslett; and above all to the burgeoning number of studies of riot. Whether or not we subscribe to notions of the moral economy of rioters, one cannot but be struck by the self-discipline both of the rioters and of their victims. It would he hard to add to ...”

“... politics doesn’t need to get any higher. But I do feel obliged to keep an eye on the polity: I read the papers, go occasionally to demonstrations and, each morning, as I walk the twenty blocks from my apartment to Columbia to teach my classes, listen to news podcasts. Which means I spent the first week of February listening to podcasts about Jeffrey ...”

“... and trade associations while he was Minister of Reconstruction. The real Addison diary can only be read in the Bodleian, and the real story of the invention and re-invention of a politician obtained only by comparing it with the published version. In this context, Benn’s published diaries are unusually candid and useful because his methods are less ...”

“... there should run such a noticeable vein of anxiety. In Roger Lewis’s extraordinary biography of Peter Sellers, for instance, proper celebration of comic genius goes hand in hand with character assassination. Every version of Tony Hancock’s life zooms in on his alcoholism and depression. David Bellos does not, in the case of Jacques Tati, have a ruthless ...”

“... in front of computer screens. The highlight of the day is ‘conference’, where the selected few read out lists to each other and then have more meetings about how they can attract more adverts for private health insurance. I imagine the average call centre is more sexy and scandalous but we hacks like to think of ourselves as living slightly on the ...”