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“... be considered a discovery of the 1990s. The first big show of his work I saw was in 1996; in 1999, John Ashbery published a book-length poem entitled Girls on the Run, the cover of which bore an arresting Darger watercolour showing some of the Vivian Girls in panic-stricken flight. The ‘literariness’ and epic ‘virtual world’ quality of Darger’s work ...”

“... merely how the game sometimes has to be played.The means they ultimately chose was to rally around John Major as the person best placed to stop Heseltine. Thatcher reluctantly came to accept this and therefore to accept the ostensible reasons they gave for her stepping aside. Very soon she would regret having fallen for it. Yet it had been clear for some time ...”

“... Digest aphorisms, fake quotations from Lenin, and conspiracy theories spun by outfits like the John Birch Society. Well into the 1980s, he remained convinced that the Kremlin leadership was intent on turning the Caribbean into a ‘Red lake’. This evidence-free formulation was used to justify the administration’s secret and illegal arming of Contra ...”

“... like the whiff of cordite long after the gun has been fired. When I mention this to David Cornwell/John le Carré, he says: ‘I can still feel it in my nostrils now.’ Historians, like spooks, need a sensitive nose, Orwell’s ‘Sniff, sniff’ for the detection of ‘all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls’.3 (And, in ...”

“... Captain Cook relatively small potatoes. Not small potatoes for the culture wars, however. Enter a brown man, Obeyesekere, who is a professor at Princeton but who grew up on a colonised island – Sri Lanka – saying that a white man, a professor at Chicago, is foisting white myths onto islanders and perpetuating the fantasy that natives first see Europeans ...”

“... at Mahoney when she brings coffee in on a serving tray, but otherwise ignore her. Mike Nichols and John Hersey win grudging approval – the former for giving her a nice tip, the latter for his kindly, slightly alcoholic smile (‘He had the look of a person who understood other people, who wanted to hear what they had to say’). Joseph Alsop, making chitchat ...”

“... reappraisal of how to govern the Health Service. She and her ministers – Jenkin, Norman Fowler, John Moore and Clarke – replaced consensus with confrontation (Clarke to the BMA: ‘you buggers will sabotage it’). They imported asphyxiating management practices from Sainsbury’s, and, by undermining professional commitment, introduced a nine-to-five ...”

“... in the Mill on the Floss (Chap. VIII) “Mrs Glegg had doubtless the glossiest and crispest brown curls in her drawers, as well as curls in various degrees of fuzzy laxness.”’ Another is treated with more formality – ‘Thank you again, dear Professor Adorno, for your friendship and for your belief in my work’ – and mocked gently behind his ...”

“... the feminist movement. Only a few lesbian novelists – Jeanette Winterson in Britain, Rita Mae Brown in the States – have become ‘crossover’ writers with a mass-market audience including, presumably, many straight readers. Perhaps a few more gay male writers – Paul Monette, David Leavitt and Armistead Maupin in the US, Alan Hollinghurst, Paul ...”

“... study which produces an earlier variant on the plausible mismatches of nature’s palette? ‘Brown woolly smoke arched and dipped over the green shadow it cast on the aquamarine lake.’ White matters less than Joyce, about whom Nabokov, on occasion, could be unruefully generous. In one interview, he gave out this undeniable admission: ‘my English is ...”

“... of comparison, San Francisco covers about 30,000 acres.) The area’s representative in Congress, John Garamendi, told the Los Angeles Times that ‘Flannery Associates is using secrecy, bullying and mobster tactics to force generational farm families to sell.’ Last August the group revealed its hand, sending out a survey announcing its intention to build ...”

“... mighty test pilots belonged, men like Trubshaw and his military counterparts Roly Beamont and Eric Brown, men who were stuffed with as much unostentatious grandeur as Chuck Yeager in the US. Benn had come along on many of Concorde’s earlier proving flights, including one in 1970 when a hydraulic system failed and the plane went into ‘an uncontrollable ...”

“... short, slight, Mekonish, in his early sixties, wearing a white shirt with a navy tanktop and brown cords. He began by saying that he never wanted to write a book on education in the first place, but people kept saying to him: ‘You know, Frank, you are the man.’ The content of what children are learning is ‘pretty sordid’, he thinks: there is far ...”

“... Harper.The relationship began to break down in the 1990s. In 1992 Ken Clarke, home secretary under John Major, announced an ambitious plan to reform policing. He described the police to Harper as ‘the last great unreformed Victorian public service’: excessively bureaucratic (the Met most of all, with five senior ranks of officer rather than the usual ...”

“... cool luminous reportage that reminds one of the work of our more storied essayists, Joan Didion or John McPhee. In the past few years the incidence of these big books has increased rapidly: three years ago, Christopher Bram published his Washington tale, Almost History; in 1994, Laura Argiri’s 19th-century melodrama The God in Flight came out, along with ...”