“... spy. The ideal spy is a mouse-coloured blur in the crowd, someone like George Smiley, described by his wife as ‘breathtakingly ordinary’. There was nothing ordinary about Angleton. Once experienced, his history, his appearance, his manner, and his stubborn refusal to be clear were all indelible. I spent an afternoon ...”

“... in its favour. It was neat and tidy. It had a simple motive and a simple response … No war is to be wished for, but if they have to be fought, this was a better one than most. There is a world of evasion in those words. These two intelligent young men, who could serve their readers with an adult judgment, are still under ...”

“... of the Party’s origins, rise and decline, while paying particular attention to the role played by its successive leaders. The 1977 election marked not only a change of government but the triumph of Revisionist Zionism after a half-century of struggle against mainstream Labour Zionism. The two movements were animated ...”

“... lassie With the silver tassie, the boy With a toy gun gunning for Covenanters, The carlin ranting by the Water of Leith, the filed, billable teeth Of lawyers, not proven under a barefaced cheek Of chloroform, high-tea sunsets, Jennerdoms of discreetest passion, Lace curtains drawn over mooning cannonballs, randy as the barrel of Mons Meg, All brass bells ...”

“... been translated, but according to Simenon’s excellent biographer Patrick Marnham it’s a would-be humorous story about his home town, Liège, ‘partly set in a chemist’s shop which specialised in laxatives for pigeons’. Over the next few years, under a variety of pseudonyms, he wrote 150 or so pulp books, mainly of novella length, from titillating ...”

“... Israeli policy, criticism of Zionism as a whole is all too often declared off-limits, and not only by the Anti-Defamation League, so for many people Sand’s attempt to break down Zionism’s ideological assumptions goes beyond the pale. Yet with the Middle East reminiscent of the pre-1914 Balkans, going beyond the pale is not only permissible but de ...”

“... box files. These included a nearly complete run of The Fantastic Four, the famous 102 issues drawn by Jack Kirby and scripted by Stan Lee, a defining artefact (I now know) of the Silver Age of comics.Luke was precocious, worldly, full of a satirical brilliance I didn’t always understand but pretended to, as I pretended to ...”

“... hear in me the funeral voices call out transcendentally, when in German style the bands go beating by. At a mad shiver of my vertebrae if I sob like a lost man, it’s that I hear the funeral voices call out transcendentally. As a ghostly gallop of zebras my dream goes strangely prowling and I am so haunted that in me always, inside my darknesses I hear the ...”

“... Thirty years ago, the campus novels of David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury mythologised a setting that expressed, better than any other, the cultural and ideological chaos of the 1960s and 1970s. The main characters were rarely students, but all the energy in these comedies of social transition flowed from the young: it was their politics and their sexuality that the generations above them were forced to flatter or fight, exploit or succumb to ...”

“... a majority of the miners had gone back to work over the preceding months, disillusioned, scared by the violence, or starved back (miners got little strike pay and no state help, since it wasn’t held by the courts to be an ‘official’ strike). Both books agree that Margaret ...”

“... among us considers what is signed over when we click ‘I agree’? This problem is not taken up by the Swiss art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist in his brief account of his formation as an Ausstellungsmacher, and it is no more than touched on by the Canadian art critic David Balzer in his ...”

“... my ambition is to weld the two of us into a new combined existence that will not only be able to withstand the shocks directed at us but will also have a positive existence for the good.’ And yet, back in the real world, he couldn’t let his children have his name (they wouldn’t allow him to), he couldn’t keep his family in the home he had ...”

“... the proper distribution of power between Parliament and the executive? It’s a question raised by the recent High Court decision in Miller v. The Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union. Under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, a member state must ‘notify the European Council of its intention’ to leave, commencing a two-year period of ...”

“... two days. Then I bought and read in a similar manner – none took me any longer than two days – David Szalay’s three previous novels: London and the South-East (one of the great mocking titles, up there with Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, or Updike’s Memories of the Ford Administration), The Innocent and Spring. I want to say that here is a ...”

“... when she died at the age of seventy was unusual: a library of several hundred books, dominated not by the standard theological works of the time but by an unmatched collection of what we would now call English literature. The most spectacular instance is the only surviving first edition of Shakespeare’s Venus and ...”