“... One of these hollow and stuffed figures has been preselected as the next occupant of the White House, and I can’t think of a major donor who hasn’t already bet on both of them. Just to keep it interesting, you may read of an ‘insurgent’ down the road, who will also be a fully paid-up member of the same Beltway or Senatorial or think-tank ...”

“... play of that name. Galileo wasn’t thinking of superheroes, of course, but Jonathan and Christopher Nolan, the writers of The Dark Knight, the new Batman movie, are certainly thinking along Galileo’s lines. What is Gotham City to do without a hero, since organised crime is always, it seems, far too much for the official institutions of law and ...”

“... upbeat. The new season (which has just opened) would include world premieres by Wayne McGregor, Christopher Wheeldon and Kyle Abraham, alongside classic ballets by Kenneth MacMillan and Frederick Ashton. In May and June, ahead of the full reopening, the company streamed an online programme featuring choreographers closely associated with the Royal ...”

“... Durrell in 1959. The formula, if one were to look to history for clues, seems fairly simple. Be white, male, fairly imposing in stature, and in possession of a large ship and obedient crew. Mysteriously circle the coast of a remote tropical island populated by savages who have never seen a white man before. Drop ...”

“... in sunlight, lovelier than sunshine on cellophane the colors shine: popsicle orange and lemon-ice white, cotton-candy pink and mint-jelly green, cherry-soda red and raspberry-jello red. Cellophane crackles in the green-and-red-tinted dark.’ Here, the frankly nauseating means to evoke the object under scrutiny. With the novelist’s own (as it ...”

“... In this short book, Christopher Hitchens sets down the main charges against Kissinger: murder, violation of human rights and complicity in mass atrocities on a scale equalled only by Eichmann, Heydrich and the like. As Hitchens admits, he isn’t the first: Joseph Heller in Good as Gold was as blunt about it all as it was possible to be ...”

“... listens to men wiser than he is argue about the intricacies of war, not least the involvement of white men in a Black conflict. ‘Is it not because of Wilson and Britain that we are losing this war?’ one man asks. ‘Yes,’ another replies,but also, look everywhere. The only reason we are alive and still fighting is because of ...”

“... were doctors trying to cure him.)This, coupled with Clinton’s ostentatious membership of an all-white golf-club, strikes me as a more pressing issue of morals and ‘character’ than l’affaire Flowers. But Clinton, who at first looks as if he welcomes a change of subject, doesn’t care for this one. He turns his back and marches away. Later on ...”

“... The lives of Christopher Wood and Barbara Hepworth are case-studies, each in its way unhappy, of the artist as a product of his own creation. For both the idea of art, the lure of fame, the wish to escape from the stolid Northern middle class into which they were born, were motivating forces as powerful as the desire to express a vision through painting or sculpture ...”

“... of the CIA, William Casey. Casey and the gang of right-wing fanatics he quickly promoted to the White House were obsessed with the clandestine. They didn’t think much of elected politicians, and preferred to carry out their policies behind the backs of Congress and the Senate. For them, the Iran-Iraq war held out glorious opportunities for covert ...”

“... of class and ethnicity. ‘Were he not Indian,’ a husband thinks of his less poshly raised white American wife in ‘A Choice of Accommodations’, ‘Megan would have probably avoided someone like him.’ Another complaint that’s sometimes voiced about Lahiri’s writing is that it’s rather stiflingly tasteful, MFA-friendly, solemn and ...”

“... night before unleashing Desert Storm, George Bush had a prayer meeting with Billy Graham in the White House. Every time that a conflict impends in any formerly Biblical land, this elderly nuisance starts drivelling about the last days and the end of time, and the Christian Broadcasting Network (which still feeds an astonishing number of American homes ...”

“... Charles and the Annenbergs, Diana and Donald Trump – the extension of Edward’s international white-trash habit into modern showbiz and celeb culture. The authoritarian trappings are less evident, true, even if you overlook the reactionary temper of Prince Philip and the quiet hard-heartedness of his wife in the matter of her sister and Group-Captain ...”

“... of Austen, George Eliot and the redoubtable Brontë sisters. There were a whole lot of black and white New Directions paperbacks, mostly poetry by people like H.D. or Denise Levertov. There were the Colette novels she read on the sly. There was the first edition of Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeleine had surreptitiously dipped into back in ...”

“... desperately inauthentic sensation. The State of the Union speech. The New Hampshire primary. The White House Easter egg roll. The presentation of the Presidential Thanksgiving turkey (which even comes complete with its own self-satirising pun). I would add the Nobel Prizes though not, oddly enough, the Booker ones. Nothing that has to be done every year ...”