“... This creature inhabits a world in which hell is other intellectuals, a jungle in which ‘survival means killing, climbing means pulling someone else down and making your way means pushing someone else aside’; in which ‘everything is either a best-seller or a flop,’ in which ‘40 ...”

“... even the lack of jokes could be remedied as the text was ‘Ronniefied’. These were among the means by which British politics was ‘Maggiefied’. Likewise, as an author. Though she was lucky to get such a big advance for her apprentice manuscript – half a dozen of Martin Amis – she set about learning the tricks of the trade from those who knew ...”

“... the ‘peace process’, adding, however, that we are ‘now moving back to the middle’. He means that we are moving way from Michael Portillo’s pompously ignorant remarks a few days ago when he gave his Israeli hosts carte blanche to do what they liked in Lebanon. I ask with a touch of acrimony why we ever left ‘the middle’ and ring off. On the ...”

“... aberration, England’s sole experience of open military rule since the Conquest. Their powers, David Hume ruled, were exercised ‘not in the legal manner of European nations, but according to the maxims of eastern tyranny’. Nineteenth-century Whiggish historians queued to condemn that ‘despotism’. That the sword reigned in Cromwellian England is ...”

“... doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty – that weird English scrap of parchment – in effect means parliamentary absolutism, a hasty 1689 transfer from the divine right of kings. We don’t have ‘inalienable rights’, but are allowed to vote and speak freely only because the government, through Parliament, generously lends some of its power to its ...”

“... progressing across a desert. But that’s confusing: higher levels of social mobility may be a means to faster growth, but mobility and prosperity are best kept distinct.There are deeper disagreements over how to understand and measure the ‘social positions’ that people are – or aren’t – moving between. All mobility research is interested in the ...”

“... tempted to pick up on this suggestion because it recalls one of the greatest of all horror movies, David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979), where so-called anger therapy results not only in a welcome release of psychic aggression but in teams of little people smashing in the heads of the people the patient doesn’t like. The real interest of Let the Right One ...”

“... personal essays, not far from the work of the so-called ‘ultra-talk’ poets (Albert Goldbarth, David Kirby) whose chatty, digressive work filled many magazines in the 1990s. Perillo told me at a recent reading that her favourite contemporary poet was C.K. Williams, whose famously long-lined, sometimes violent poems were as committed as she is to ...”

“... home and meet the world.’ But to rehearse a good play with a company of good actors (and that means intelligent, witty, energetic and entertaining people) is to experience the rare phenomenon of being part of a successful social group sharing common aims, mutual respect and pleasure in each other’s company. It is a paradigm, rarely achieved outside ...”

“... about. But it was no fun losing all of the battles, and I am still trying to work out what it means that we should so thoroughly have lost all of them. What can we do about it? Let me put the matter as starkly as I can. If we can’t speak the language of our enemies, not only will they not listen to us – they might not listen to us anyway – but they ...”

“... be news to mothers, nurses and prostitutes, but the massive swelling of the service economy means that emotional availability can no longer be dismissed as women’s work; it must be seen as a dominant commodity form under late capitalism. And it has to be real. ‘The authenticity of being happy is important,’ a Pret manager tells the ...”

“... Histoire naturelle rubs up against vitriolic anti-Franco cartoons; Cranach the Elder’s David and Bathsheba is subject to a fierce analytic glare. Throughout, Picasso’s lovers, friends and forebears drift in and out (Vollard, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, Jacqueline Roque, Manet, Rembrandt), taking one role then another in an endless play of ...”

“... only a couple of weeks ago and giving entirely good reasons why Gordon Brown was on top and David Cameron on the ropes now look faintly embarrassing. But at the beginning of October Brown was on top and no one can be faulted for failing to see his impending humiliation. Nor could they have predicted that the abandonment of a premature general election ...”

“... from 70 years because he named the policemen he had been paying off. We know what ‘true story’ means in such instances: the basic facts are given but they are coloured and tilted by the rules of genre and the star system, which is to say by a shift into the realm of glamour and romance. But Scott wants to have it both ways, to give us both grim facts and ...”

“... Given how busy he was, it would have taken some special prescience to think of this as his means of winning over the public, especially since many of them had little idea of what Twitter was even when he left office three years later. ‘During my time as an MP,’ he writes, ‘I never mastered the capacity to leave a good impression or sculpt my ...”