“... is a tantalising suspicion of bitterness when the wine hits the top of the palate.’ Christie’s Michael Broadbent recently recalled the heyday of this style: I do like a bit of pure poetry, my favourite author being the late and great André Simon. At the end of a lunch at the Hind’s Head in Bray . . . his host asked Simon for his first reaction to the ...”

“... nowadays tends to go unnoticed: he looked the part. A bulbous, bald dome, along with some receding black hair and dark moustache, produced a quirky resemblance to Lenin. Although his biographer John Bew finds the likeness ‘somewhat forced’, he notes that contemporary observers as different in their politics as George Orwell and the Daily Mail made sport ...”

“... town, so featureless and undetailed that it seemed designed to be seen only in passing, in the black gummy frame of a carriage window. But the ‘libr’ in there was enticing, though a huge exaggeration, and the ‘amont’ was poetic – en amont in French means ‘upstream’ – so the place had a promising swagger to it, in name at least. Rimbaud ...”

“... will culminate in an expertly targeted head-butt. Her mother’s swashbuckling new lover, Connor (Michael Fassbender), seems like a good thing, with his easy charm and his largesse; until, aroused by Mia’s pugnacity, he starts to groom her for sex. Like Katie in Red Road, she exacts a revenge as cunning as it is ferocious. But for her there will be no ...”

“... inheritances of Ulster: The linen mills, the long wet grass, the ragged hawthorn. And one read black where the other read white, his hope The other man’s damnation: Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope, And God Save – as you prefer – the King or Ireland However, one of the most important reclamations of recent years is the group of translations, by ...”

“... the more provocative he becomes. The quotes about the IRA, the Royal Wedding, gay rights and black pride continue to flow; his wretched Labour group on the GLC have often paid the price, pockmarked by the shower of missiles aimed at their leader and obliged to watch many of their most ‘popular’ measures obliterated from view by the latest scandal ...”

“... response I find a strain, Suspecting that this pontiff talks hot air And only got the part when Michael Caine Turned cold on the long frocks he’d have to wear. But thousands of young Catholics seemed delighted As if he were the Beatles reunited. Without fail each rock-concert-sized crowd Goes mad while the old boy lays down the law. It seems that birth ...”

“... gets between these stories and our complete enjoyment of them: there’s no element of parody or black comedy in the situations Ruth Rendell envisages, not even when it comes to a man’s obsession with a dress-shop dummy, which leads him to act peculiarly in a basement. Why should there be, she might ask, when her theme is criminal derangement and the forms ...”

“... that is given of the son’s avant-gardism. Having gone for a prevailing, historically appropriate black-and-white, Reitz himself is avant-garde enough to fleck the film with colour as a heightening for critical moments. In the context of the film at large, however, these dabs and flecks could be thought an alien feature – caviare to the general, Stockhausen ...”

“... If​ universities had been an invention of the second half of the 20th century,’ Michael Dummett wondered in his last book, The Nature and Future of Philosophy (2010), ‘would anyone have thought to include philosophy among the subjects that they taught and studied?’ Dummett’s anxiety wasn’t whether philosophy could survive at a time when the value of a university education is gauged in increasingly reductive, economic terms ...”

“... organised charity concerts, a sleep-out in front of the Home Office, and managed to secure the QC Michael Mansfield’s services pro bono. By and large, the campaign was a success: it brought the pair home. Their names were never cleared, but their sentences were reduced at appeal, and they were not sent back to prison after the hearing. Some of Masters’s ...”

“... betide Neil Kinnock or Roy Hattersley if he turns out to be a quintessentially decent fellow like Michael Foot. Churchill was not altogether decent, otherwise he would have been a lesser man. Gilbert records his magnanimous gestures, such as the considerate letters written to the dying Neville Chamberlain, or the glorious episode of the Bovril and ...”

“... Meanwhile Stalin, suffering from toothache, sits on the verandah of his dacha in Sochi on the Black Sea, rewriting the history of the Bolshevik underground in Baku, and brooding on the ‘technology of power’: ‘A state apparatus that is a reliable executor of the supreme will must be kept in a state of fear. That fear will then be passed on to the ...”

“... Wilson. The greater the distance from which human life is seen, the more like a certain kind of black comedy it tends to look. Updike has praised the ‘sublime hard-heartedness’ of Waugh’s fiction, and contrasted it favourably with the ‘claustrophobically human’ universe of Kingsley Amis. There is something of that hard-heartedness about S.. A ...”

“... the Princess of Wales are of great moment to young Saudi women. Even the censors, with their big black felt-tips, have been known to spare the royal decolletage; the Princess shares with the Empress Maria Theresa, whose image graced the old silver coinage, the distinction of being the only bared bosom on view. As a matter of honour, arms, legs and faces must ...”