“... a major phase of his writing career. As he put it in an interview with Melvyn Bragg in 1983, ‘by the end of the Smiley books I’d gone too far into a private world.’ The Smiley saga ends, it will be remembered, with Karla crossing no man’s land, betrayed into defection by love ...”

“... What have Margaret Thatcher and David Steel in common, apart from holding the leadership of their respective political parties? Both are highly intelligent and educated persons with academic qualifications – Thatcher in chemistry and law, Steel in arts and law. Both have been called to the bar, and for both politics has been the main preoccupation of their adult lives ...”

“... After working​ on his film adaptation of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1991), David Cronenberg apotheosised both the writer and himself by claiming his screenwriting and Burroughs’s literary style had synergised. Cronenberg apparently mused that were Burroughs to die he might write his next novel ...”

“... tiny Douglas Hogg, with his flat cap and backpack, breathlessly hurrying down the street pursued by a giant fuzzy insect in the form of a microphone. ‘That is not correct. That is not correct,’ he told the insect, like a pedantic character in Alice in Wonderland. ‘The schedule was not a claims schedule, it was a letter.’ It was disconcerting to see ...”

“... Or ran further out of patience than usual: usually they just beat him up. The detective is puzzled by the back story. If the man stole the money every time, why did they let him play for so long? The boy says: ‘Got to. This is America, man.’ We get a quick glimpse of the staring eyes of the corpse, and the credits start to roll. The first season of The ...”

“... of St Aubyn’s own prose is almost indistinguishable from theirs. Evelyn Waugh is often invoked by reviewers of St Aubyn, but Jane Austen and Henry James might be equal influences, the Austen and James whose drawing-room performers are in some ways inseparable, stylistically at least, from the authors’ own ...”

“... range of Brexit options at a Tory Conference fringe event in October, the former Brexit minister David Jones concluded: ‘If necessary, as Churchill once said, very well then, alone.’ This is the sort of nostalgia Stuart Hall warned against as early as the 1970s, and which Peter Ammon, the outgoing German ambassador in London, identified recently when he ...”

“... quite tearful, beating their plastic swords against their plastic shields. But the biggest cheer by far came the night after when Tony Hadley arrived to sing Spandau Ballet’s ‘Gold’. Hadley, the Thatcherite singer in an otherwise left-leaning band, was holding a glass of Jack Daniels. He seemed in touch with his audience and every bit as drunk. I’m ...”

“... Vernon Howell​ – better known as David Koresh – arrived at Mount Carmel, the Texas base of a Seventh Day Adventist splinter sect called the Branch Davidians, in the summer of 1981. He was 21 years old and looking for a new church. A ‘wandering bonehead’, as he would later describe himself, he had been kicked out of a mainstream Seventh Day Adventist congregation in Tyler, Texas for having sex with the 15-year-old daughter of a church elder (or at least trying to), and for refusing to stop haranguing church leaders about the correct interpretation of scripture ...”

“... students at the university issued a report titled Yale, Slavery and Abolition. It was published by the Amistad Committee, a small organisation in New Haven that seeks to preserve African American history in Connecticut; it is named after the maritime slave revolt of 1839. The report drew attention to the university’s ties to enslavement at a time when its ...”

“... The suffocating presence of Jiang Qing (Mao’s wife and aesthetic dictator of the day) could be felt almost everywhere. Even so, there was quite a variety of work on show: some stiff, hieratic seal-style calligraphy, and experiments in inking landscapes on soft absorbent paper in unusual ways, as well as the endless, predictable sunlit parade of pictures ...”

“... The more felonious associates of Richard Nixon were unquestionably enhanced as authors by their criminality. However, this is not essential: Mr David Stockman, President Reagan’s first Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the OMB, has been offered a million or so for the rendering of his tenure in ...”

“... I was​ the head of the Piers Gaveston Society, which is the society that David Cameron allegedly stuck his dick in a pig for. I never did that. According to Lord Ashcroft’s unofficial biography of the prime minister, Cameron did what he did as part of an initiation ritual, but the society in my day (late 2000s) didn’t have initiation rituals because it wasn’t a proper society ...”

“... David Smith is often seen as the Jackson Pollock of modern sculpture, the artist who transformed European innovations (in welded steel above all) into an American idiom of expanded scale and expressive power. Like most legends in art history, this isn’t false, despite the immediate catch that his greatest follower, Anthony Caro, is English ...”

“... In the abbot’s private museum, for example, next to a skeleton in a vitrine, there used to be a replica of Michelangelo’s David, exposing himself, scarlet Y-fronts fashionably dropped, to show a sea cucumber-like penis quite unlike the original. Their numbers have now dwindled to a mere million or so, but forty ...”