“... but continued with the motorcade, had lunch as planned at the Trade Mart, went on to Austin and Johnson’s ranch; went shooting with Johnson the following morning. For various reasons, this story is more real than anything else in the novel; an eloquent and moving representation of our disbelief. For the rest, in the ...”

“... I realise this will probably sound absurd, especially to those Brexiteer politicians like Boris Johnson who have been assiduously channelling Churchill’s spirit for so long they can scarcely remember what the point is anymore. May, with her pinched, airless, bureaucratic approach to Brexit looks to them like a modest little woman with a great deal to be ...”

“... their bidding. They were wrong. With Brexit, it is true that many politicians – above all, Boris Johnson – appear to harbour Suez-like illusions about how easy it should be to get others to do our bidding. But the difference is that Brexit is not a policy concocted in secret by an out-of-touch political elite. It was the choice of the people in a ...”

“... and political platform for Labour, has been elaborated with the help of Tony Blair’s adviser, David Miliband, and sees Blair’s election as leader as an epochal event, finally settling Labour’s commitment to social democracy. All of which sounds very much as if Hutton hopes to become a key adviser in a future Blair administration, though the Tories may ...”

“... Among the faithful is Danny Kruger, the MP for Devizes, a former political secretary to Boris Johnson, leader-writer at the Daily Telegraph and co-founder (with Miriam Cates) of the New Social Covenant Unit, a right-wing think tank. Ahead of NatCon, Kruger outlined his vision in the New Statesman. Britain, he asserted, is ruled by faceless ‘powers that ...”

“... the fatal tendency of the Conservative governments to which Britain has been subjected since 2010. David Cameron’s declaration in January 2013 that, if the Conservatives won the next election, they would offer a referendum on membership of the EU – which wasn’t a significant concern, never mind a priority, for British voters – is a fine ...”

“... coaches and managers of the major world soccer teams, and all manner of celebrities, ranging from David Beckham to Charlize Theron. There has been much speculation about whether Diego Maradona will attend the draw. He has been banned from doing so after a recent foul-mouthed TV performance, judged to have brought the game into disrepute, but he is apparently ...”

“... In January, the Mail on Sunday led with an interview with the former chief Brexit negotiator David Frost: ‘I think people have been sold a kind of view that the net zero transition can happen without much increase in costs or problems. That’s obviously not the case and people are now seeing that.’ The Daily Mail quoted Julian Knight, chair of the ...”

“... the Latinate culture that spawned figures as diverse as Milton, Hobbes and (at its end) Samuel Johnson. The waning of humanistic education in the 18th century, and the later separation of the modern academic disciplines, has made Utopia doubly distant and difficult. Without a knowledge of the categories More was manipulating, we are left with battles ...”

“... want to be patronised by businesspeople who have never won a vote (‘Fuck business,’ as Boris Johnson neatly put it). So they snarl and joust, looking for any advantage they can get, while taking every opportunity to stitch up deals behind the scenes. Meanwhile, citizens and consumers (who are often, but not always, the same) watch the antics of their ...”

“... in the volume make little attempt to seem ‘new’. Fredric Bogel has a fascinating study of ‘Johnson and the role of authority’ which could equally easily have found its way into the despised journal Eighteenth-Century Studies. It begins with two contrasting images. In the Dictionary Johnson defined tripod as ‘a ...”

“... have fallen into the condition of viewing all things as texts,’ says Hartman. Or, as Barbara Johnson puts it in her resourceful introduction, ‘nothing, indeed, can be said to be not a text.’At that an earlier Dr Johnson might again have kicked a stone, and G.E. Moore would perhaps have challenged Derrida to hold up ...”

“... to this nation’.) Opposition to multiculturalism became a key part of the Ukip platform, and of David Cameron’s attempt to protect his government’s right flank from Nigel Farage.Punitive prison sentences (often four or five years long) were handed out to the young British-Asian men charged with rioting in Bradford, many of whom had been taken by their ...”

“... a bus station with its satellite café. When the bus station was demolished, the café failed. David Mills, the Owl Man of Albion Drive, fenced the site, built hutches for his birds and excavated a carp pool. For years, nobody cared. He had, like so many others in this borough, slipped into a crack between worlds. If the council acknowledged his existence ...”

“... things​ in the relations between authors and publishers never change. Dear Mr Murray, edited by David McClay (John Murray, £16.99), a collection of letters written to six generations of the Murray family, is full of familiar complaints. Jane Austen was ‘very much disappointed … by the delays of the printers’. Maria Rundell, author of A New System of ...”