“... and These Times (2020). For the record, here are some of Carmen Callil’s causes: 1950s. At the Star of the Sea convent in Melbourne, Carmen acquired a lifelong revulsion for the Catholic Church. All through lockdown, Carmen, Helen Simpson, Graeme Segal and I met monthly online for our tiny book club. One of the books Carmen praised wholeheartedly was Small ...”

“... in 1961 and who told the press she would ‘spend, spend, spend’ (she later served as the cover star of the Smiths’ single ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’), is the presiding spirit. Viv struggled, but the idea that an ordinary person can be elevated by riches, transformed by holidays and furs, is more plausible to many than transformation through ...”

“... politics, others dismiss it. They are not told that two rival armies, led by A.G. Dickens and Christopher Haigh, have fought vicious Balkan wars over the events and processes we know as the English Reformation: from above or from below, early or late, success or failure? Until we reach her ‘Bibliographical Essay’, which is organised on ...”

“... personalities. It may be surmised that this owed something to the Victorian theatre cult of the star actor-manager, or the pulpit cult of the star preacher like Spurgeon. Hardie’s insistence on his own policies and methods led to unseemly squabbles with the paper’s backers, and recent research seems to show him in no ...”

“... to the Hungarian checkpoint, where George was quick to notice that the guards had removed the red star from their caps. Not only that: they were flying the flag of the revolution – the red, white and green tricolour, with a jagged hole in the centre, where the Communist emblem, a hammer and wheat-sheaf, had been. Mikes had been a regular broadcaster in the ...”

“... Hillary Clinton could not be denied a prominent role, not only because Elizabeth Dole was the star at San Diego but because the feminist and semi-feminist vote is a key Clinton constituency. But Hillary’s speech – worked out, contrary to most published reports, with Richard Morris – emphasised children and child-rearing and thus her own culturally ...”

“... an uncle and a priest (you need to consult the notes to be quite sure that Chekhov thought Father Christopher silly), Yegorushka travels the prairies of Southern Russia, as Chekhov had lately done and as he had done before in his youth. He transfers for a while to a caravan of carters, perched on the loads. The birds and plants of the steppe are observed. A ...”

“... is no doubt that Bull was good at his work. By the late Fifties, long before anyone had heard of Star Wars, he was devising ways of intercepting intercontinental ballistic missiles with a sort of giant shotgun. Often shunned by the American defence establishment, he designed guns for Third World customers that were better than anything in the Nato ...”

“... schools and Mehta tells us why – which seems a bit much in a book published by John Murray. Christopher Hill – he of the little-finger handshake – is asked to explain the attractions of Marxism in the light of the Hungarian Revolution. Lord Oxmanton’s mother is asked to explain the rules and rituals of pheasant-shoots. Useful stuff if you happen ...”

“... there in the final weeks. If things had turned out differently, there would no doubt have been star-struck puff pieces on the bleeding edge data analytics that were behind the election of America’s first female president. The scandal is twofold, but neither part really concerns elections. The first is the ‘data breach’, which granted the Trump ...”

“... man. What we know of his frustrations, fantasies and fears we know from his stories. Dracula, Christopher Frayling writes in his preface to the Penguin edition, ‘was probably transgressing something – but the critics weren’t quite sure exactly what’. The author probably wasn’t sure either. All Stoker seems to have wanted to do was to write a ...”

“... to repurpose Gibson’s phrase – of internet shopping kicked in. There was also, after 1977, the Star Wars problem, and the visual similarity of the Doctor’s second-best adversaries to C3PO, the trite butler-robot. Which is why Cybermen no longer impress us. The metaphorical connections no longer lead adults, at least, to things we find exciting – unlike ...”

“... to mistake but even to betray its nature. Criticism, in any case, is no longer what it was; and Christopher Norris’s compact book on deconstruction is more useful, in its open-minded descriptive acuity, than other, more complex and defensive, treatments. Occasionally Norris falls into distancing gestures about ‘going too far’ or ‘rhapsodic ...”

“... In​ 1975 David Bowie was in Los Angeles pretending to star in a film that wasn’t being made, adapted from a memoir he would never complete, to be called ‘The Return of the Thin White Duke’. This dubious pseudonymous character was first aired in an interview with Rolling Stone’s bumptious but canny young reporter Cameron Crowe; it soon became notorious ...”

“... last days of the George McGovern campaign, in Texas, in 1972. Clinton was sent down to the Lone Star state, along with his friend Taylor Branch, at a moment when the Nixon forces seemed almost unstoppable. (A subsequent post-Watergate myth has depicted the press as anti-Nixon during this period. In point of fact, the general refusal of the media to discuss ...”