“... bookshop reading is, of course, the chance to see and hear David Starkey cheek by jowl with Zadie Smith, Roy Strong, Terry Jones, Michael Holroyd and all the other writers showcasing their various talents this year. Such events certainly seem to be increasing rapidly in number and variety. Cheltenham and Hay-on-Wye (Tony ...”

“... just the sort of ‘bridge-builder’ a new field needs. In 1973, Dyos and the literary scholar Michael Wolff, then at MIT, brought out The Victorian City, a copiously illustrated two-volume compilation of essays on everything from railway termini to pubs, slums to suburbs and poets to prostitutes. The defining publication of this infant field, it is the ...”

“... John Smith was ‘one of them’. Tony Blair is ‘one of them’. And so are Chris Smith and Jack Straw and half the Shadow Cabinet and many more on the backbenches including Frank Field, that one-man think-tank of the Labour Right. ‘They’ are the Christian socialists, architects of New Labour, ready to provide the movement with the ethical foundations which seem sorely missing ...”

“... In a respectful but chary review of The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) in the New York Review of Books, Nadine Gordimer wrote about J.M. Coetzee’s ‘conscious choice’ of allegory as a literary mode in his first three novels. The reasons for this, she speculated, were temperamental: It seemed he did so out of a kind of opposing desire to hold himself clear of events and their daily, grubby, tragic consequences in which, like everyone else living in South Africa, he is up to the neck, and about which he had an inner compulsion to write ...”

“... is finally reduced to a numbed tone as he recounts his sister’s pointless death. Like Stevie Smith, Tama Janowitz is aware that ‘being comical does not ameliorate the desperation.’ The narrator of Novel on Yellow Paper refers to the ‘talking voice that runs on, and the thoughts that come’. Eleanor comments: ‘Well, once again I am silently ...”

“... There is a remarkable story here by Giuseppe Pontiggia, coolly and crisply translated by Zadie Smith, about an Italian boy who falls in love with practicality and his own sense of the way things really are: he can’t stand his father’s insistence on poetry and culture. He grows up, lives and dies according to his own plan, a model of willed ...”

“... him John, a choice that Alexie uses to signal a well-meaning lack of imagination, and when John Smith grows up, Indian-born but raised by whites, he will become the chief suspect in the search for the Indian Killer. It’s not an unreasonable assumption: John has heard a ‘noise in his head’ since he was ten, and though as a teenager he seems ‘a ...”

“... come to draw $4500 from Roland Boudreaux’s account. Asked if he has authorisation, he produces a Smith and Wesson.44 and says: ‘Right here.’ When Amelia is asked if she could see herself married to ‘an ordinary working man’, she says: ‘Well, not if he’s just ordinary.’ In Wendy Gimbel’s memoir, Havana Dreams, the Maine is part of a much ...”

“... though William McFeely won a Pulitzer Prize for his Grant (1981), that did not deter Jean Edward Smith from publishing a massive new Grant (2001), which some politicians have been reading with furtive pleasure because it finds that Gilded Age Administration less corrupt than had been believed. The Conservative pundit Richard Brookhiser gave us Founding ...”

“... an elaborate trap. Using actors pretending to be businessmen, the programme-makers approached Sir Michael Grylls, long-standing Tory MP for North-West Surrey, and introduced themselves as agents for a firm which wanted to smuggle art treasures out of Russia. As a cover for their enterprise, they explained, they wanted to buy a government agency, preferably ...”

“... the implications for Whitehall should be read by every civil servant. Norton-Taylor observes that Michael Heseltine, like the rest of the Government, was stunned, and stung, by the jury’s verdict, and was determined to fight back, to have the last word, and to keep the pressure on Ponting for as long as possible. The result was that, at quite unusually ...”

“... founding fathers anyway. (Both things are more or less right.) It is probably because John Smith, who led the party from July 1992 until his death in 1994, would not be prematurely enrolled in New Labour that the depiction of him here is so bleak. The man who might have led Labour to victory, thus bypassing the possibility of a Blair leadership, is not ...”

“... a good time to reflect on the conditions of economic success, and the recent anniversary of Adam Smith’s death makes it all the more appropriate. More than two hundred years after the publication of his Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations there is still remarkably little consensus among academics, politicians and industrialists about what makes for economic ...”

“... by the market, still a fake? What does intention matter if your audience doesn’t care about it? Michael ‘Butcher’ Boone, one of the two narrators of Theft, is a once famous Australian artist, newly divorced and down on his luck. His work is now very unfashionable, and he has retreated to a rustic house in New South Wales owned by his patron. Here, ...”

“... with any knowledge of recent history, yet the Conservative Parliamentary Party, its strategists in Smith Square, its aged followers in the country and its North American press supporters were too paralysed by ideology to accept it. Over Europe, too, much of the Conservative Party has been gazing selectively at the past. It seems to regard England (not even the ...”