“... joke: ‘Muhammad Ali was Jewish’ (Chapter 2); ‘Bette Davis was Jewish’ (Chapter 3); ‘John Lennon was Jewish’ (Chapter 4); and so on. The text often blooms into a special boxed feature, such as: ‘The Joke about the Pope and the Chief Rabbi’ (this takes a whole page) or: Haggadah (Pop Quiz #1) Q. When Alex and Adam had a smoke, how much of ...”

“... microscope, he carved and painted sculptures measurable in microns and millimetres; his Pope John Paul IIholds a cross crafted from a hair divided into sixths, making its width slightly less than the diameter of two red blood cells. His portrait of Little Red Riding Hood, whose diminutive has never been so well-deserved, features a mere speck of a girl ...”

“... inflicting great damage on the economy. Yet politically, the Major government was bound hand and foot to its existing policy – and Labour’s only criticism was that the policy did not go far enough. That was the position at the time of the general election in April 1992, at which Major squeaked home for another term. When Black Wednesday came in ...”

“... to rationalise. Two examples of dissent are given in Thomas Blass’s book. One man puts his foot down at 135 volts: EXPERIMENTER: The experiment requires that you go on, teacher. Go on, please. SUBJECT: But if you don’t mind, I’d like to see him myself before I do go on. EXPERIMENTER: . . . It’s absolutely essential that you ...”

“... handled the countdown with more aggression and a lot more self-importance. The selector, John Hart, on their arrival in the changing room: ‘It’s going to be a long wait, boys. Time to concentrate.’ Then the coach Brian Lochore, voice breaking with emotion: ‘You’re a good team but you’re not yet a great team. If you win today you can say ...”

“... from his work, but had mentally classified him alongside Sidney Sheldon, Colleen McCullough and John Jakes, writers of great popular appeal in my youth, whose moment had passed and whose work was unlikely to be revisited. I came of age as a writer in the 1990s, in Montana, where I moved to attend graduate school, and cut my teeth on the literature of the ...”

“... at Alexander Pope’s villa in Twickenham (affectionately known as Twitnam) alongside the poet John Gay. This summer was, Grant claims, ‘one of the most consequential in English literary history’. Not only did the men breakfast on ‘bread and butter, toast, warm rolls, muffins, spiced bread or seed cake, with a bowl of coffee or chocolate sweetened ...”

“... country … The silence, I find, is a factor which has enabled the evil to spread.’ Likewise John Gordon, in the Sunday Express, who seized on John Gielgud’s arrest for importuning in 1953 as a chance to rip aside the ‘protective veil’ of delicacy around this ‘repulsive’ and ‘peculiarly ...”

“... foreigner in crumpled battledress. He came to know Spender, Orwell, MacNeice, Philip Toynbee and John Lehmann, and was invited to their parties. The Tribune left-wingers adored him; Michael Foot (as he put it himself) ‘fell an immediate swooning victim to his wit, charm and inordinate capacity for alcohol’, and to his ...”

“... in return, doctors would support the NHS. Bevan agreed, and an amending Act was drawn up. Michael Foot, in his recently republished biography of Bevan, concludes that ‘the Minister and the president of the Royal College of Physicians established an accord.’ It was an accord that split the profession (the BMA accused the College of ...”

“... has gone horribly wrong, and the solace the authors find in the architecture of Caruso St John or Eric Parry does not make up for it. No guide to London’s architecture has ever been so successful. Regularly updated from top to bottom every decade or so since its first publication in 1983 it obviously fulfils a need. There is no shortage of guides to ...”

“... This​ book is a departure from John Carey’s normal mode, much more intently introductory than anything else he has written in a long and distinguished career. A Little History of Poetry canters from Gilgamesh and Homer to Mary Oliver and Les Murray in three hundred pages with a breezy sense of mission, assuming in the reader no previous acquaintance with the subject (‘Confessional poetry is poetry that reveals personal confidences, especially relating to mental illness and hospitalisation’) or indeed with other sorts of knowledge that might be thought fairly general (‘Totalitarian regimes seek to control every aspect of life, including writing ...”

“... moments, those in which ‘a hand lighting a cigarette is the explanation of everything; a foot stepping from the train is the rock of all existence.’ From the start, the Auden effect was an odd blend of the diagnostic and the atmospheric, with the latter somehow complicating the former. Sometimes it’s a mock-heroic toying (‘O Who is trying to ...”

“... to the ‘kitchen sink’ allegedly installed somewhere in the house. Novels by Stan Barstow, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey and others framed stories told from the point of view of an aspiring and/or truculent working-class protagonist, often Northern, usually but not always male, as a Bildungsroman or novel of moral and sentimental ...”

“... His Protestantism shows up in some lovely moments, however, such as when he bathes at the Forty Foot in Dublin in 1936 and sees a Father McGrath, ‘red all over with ingrowning semen & exposure’. The footnote remarks drily: ‘It is not known to which Father McGrath SB refers.’ Beckett’s South Dublin Unionist background emerges also in some wonderful ...”