“... is much closer to the experience of being English than you would expect from a caricature.Ian McEwan’s new novel is as English as they come. The ‘lessons’ of the title aren’t meant to be lessons in how to write an English novel, but they might as well be: it’s the sort of book only an English man of a certain age would set out to write ...”

“... Ian Gilmour could scarcely have timed the publication of this book better. The last few weeks really have been a Marxist ‘conjuncture’: a heightened moment when social realities can no longer be contained by dominant ideologies; or, in the idiom of an un-Marxist age, the moment when the sky is darkened by chickens returning to roost ...”

“... rig, set up over six nights so that the camera could dart and swoop across the gleaming black floors, through empty arches and up towards distant cornices and discreet modern light fittings. At each turn it discovers works exhibited in the gallery over the past seventy years, and where those works are unavailable or no longer extant they’ve been ...”

“... he clearly loved. But it is a long way from being the misty-eyed picture of a faultless hero. Black Tam o’the Binns has a reputation to maintain as a man who puts truth and objectivity before mere friendship. Faithfully, he paints in the warts alongside the beauty spots. And, God knows, there were plenty of warts. Some were simple bad manners, such as ...”

“... words, ‘This machine kills fascists,’ the phrase stickered by Guthrie onto his beautiful old black Gibson L-00 and later onto his sunburst Southern Jumbo, guitars full of both threat and promise. Alas, my machine – a dirt-cheap Yamaha dreadnought with plastic machine heads coated to look silver, a terrible action and tooth-rattling fret buzz – merely ...”

“... is pitted against a sort of Stalin/Hitler autocrat whom Osbert seemed on balance to prefer. ‘A black and bilious production’, Ziegler calls it, but the book’s attitudes are in line with what we have learned of Osbert’s politics. In 1949, though, with sales figures riding high, the thing seemed a touch ungrateful: The Emperor Demos! Sired by ...”

“... wrote, because Frederick the Great insisted on robbing a neighbour he was pledged to defend, ‘black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America.’ Now south Lebanon is reduced to rubble and the Palestinians are bludgeoned and blockaded into submission to secure the re-election of Peres and ...”

“... that when the literary father-figures he has in mind turn out to be Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan, it’s hard to believe him. Father’s ghost has to be grander. And he is. Adair the novelist’s true problem, which Amis notoriously shares, is with Nabokov. Adair’s 1990 novel, Love and Death on Long Island, ‘currently’, according to his ...”

“... Ian McEwan’s vividly and meticulously imagined novels often focus on characters whose imaginations are either unwholesomely vivid or dryly meticulous. At one end of the spectrum lurk the sex murderers in The Comfort of Strangers (1981), Robert and Caroline, whose actions lead their victim’s girlfriend to surmise that ‘the imagination, the sexual imagination’, embodies ‘a powerful single organising principle’ which distorts ‘all relations, all truth ...”

“... cool, cruel blue to Townshend’s three-minute psychodrama – ‘I look all white/but my dad was black’ – was the brief, paradoxical flare of Mod: the story of how a small cabal of British jazz obsessives conducting a besotted affair with the style arcana of Europe and America somehow became an army of scooter-borne rock fans, draped in the ambiguous ...”

“... defence and science correspondent, Chapman Pincher. Out of the Express’s triumvirate of black-glass offices in London, Manchester and Glasgow came a torrent of newsprint that set the popular tone for the last days of imperial Britain, the ‘second Elizabethan age’ that was half-thrilled and half-terrified by Britain’s endeavours to build its ...”

“... There have been three English translations. Another artist who loves Surrealism is my friend Ian Breakwell, whose Diary 1964-1985 has just been published in paperback by Pluto Press.* Tom Stoppard wrote a play called After Magritte which was a leaden travesty of Magritte’s philosophy of art, which set up a fantastically silly tableau and then explained ...”

“... Ian​ Hamilton once recounted in the LRB (22 October 1992) that ‘when William F. Buckley Jr sent a copy of his essays to Norman Mailer, he pencilled a welcoming “Hi, Norman!” in the index, next to Mailer’s name.’ The index discloses a lot about the nature of a book, and the passions of its author, more than is sometimes realised (‘acknowledgments’ are similarly illuminating ...”

“... a bullet sent that man to eternity, he was pestering her … she will tell you that Fahmy kept a black valet to watch over this white woman’s suite of rooms, conditions that really make me shudder, [placing her] in that state of obedience which a black man wants from a woman who is his chattel. No one objected, though ...”

“... seats free in both carriages. As I began moving to my left, a large, dark-skinned man with a thick black beard, clutching a rucksack in his arms, stepped through the door to my right. I paused in mid-step; then turned, followed him and sat down opposite him. The man seemed to be around thirty, although the beard made it hard to tell. Brown sandals exposed the ...”