“... do, how much will it cost the British and French public? Defending her record in Parliament on the day she resigned in 1990, Thatcher spoke in patriotic tones of how, with millions of people buying shares in former state industries, privatisation was giving ‘power back to the people’, and how competition at home and open markets in Europe would free ...”

“... and clowns, who entertained all the dignitaries, knights and ladies who visited his house every day to have their portraits painted. Moreover, he had lavish dishes prepared for them at his table, at the cost of thirty scudi a day ... he employed men and women who served as models for the portraits of the lords and ...”

“... Garden heist. We learn that three of the men who were arrested at gunpoint in Kent the other day are pensioners. Brian Reader is 76 and the owner of a second-hand car dealership called Pentire Cars. He is also the owner of the kind of moustache you used to see on ‘Wanted’ posters. While the nation hates terrorists and paedophiles, it rather likes ...”

“... if no one today knows quite what ‘Gonatas’ meant (‘knock knees’ is one plausible theory). Robin Waterfield wisely takes the city states of European Greece as the backdrop for Antigonus’ life and the arena where his influence was principally felt. The Making of a King is only in part a biography of Antigonus. It also details the decline, economic ...”

“... Halfway​ through my first reading of ‘Liberation Day’, the 63-page title novella of George Saunders’s new collection, a man appears to me. He is not George Saunders exactly – an old version maybe, or a could-have-been. He is speaking the story, or writing it, or daydreaming it at a desk in an empty classroom ...”

“... prescribed tobacco to keep his weight in check, and he obliged them by smoking twenty cigars a day, the same number as Winston Churchill. Though engagingly written, Robin Marantz Henig’s biography adds little that’s new. It is also guilty of perpetuating some colourful but misleading myths. One pertains to the ...”

“... about the architecture of such notorious concretised dark stars as London’s Thamesmead and Robin Hood Gardens, or Sheffield’s Park Hill: he has been a passionate proselytiser. Thamesmead’s isolation and the GLC’s policy of dumping tenants on the estate may have been a strong impetus to downward mobility, but nothing should detract from the fact ...”

“... A sugar plantation with its mill, and its businesslike organisation and rhythms of work, bore, as Robin Blackburn points out, a clear resemblance to the factory that emerged with the Industrial Revolution; and its labour force was ‘more intensively exploited than any group of this size in history’. By a kind of poetic justice, of the three commodities ...”

“... credits are a minor ironic masterpiece. The stirring theme music soars over images of an American robin, the exterior of a sawmill, the machinery inside the mill, snowflakes billowing over a waterfall, fir trees rising majestically behind the town sign: ‘Welcome to Twin Peaks, Population 51,201’. That prominent ‘1’ denoting dead Laura ...”

“... have ‘calamitously misinterpreted’ his thought. The academics and zealots have had their day apparently, and it is time, Wheen says, ‘to strip away the mythology and try to rediscover Karl Marx the man’. If your immediate response is ‘why?’, you’ve probably been off-planet for a few years. The biographical obsession, personality-bound cod ...”

“... Penelope summons Juliet. ‘It’s time,’ she writes. But when Juliet arrives on the appointed day, Penelope has vanished. The news is related with covert, gleeful hostility by the woman who runs the Spiritual Balance Centre – you know the type instantly. But this is the problem. She’s a caricature, just like Don, the Christian minister who appears ...”

“... had already fled the Philippines. And yet the Tasaday – whoever they are – are there to this day, living in what remains of their jungle. Manda himself is dead but John Nance is still in regular contact and continues to maintain that they are genuine, a story from which he has never wavered for over thirty years. Linguists have identified their dialect ...”

“... beady eye on the House of Commons. When there are differences between the two main parties of the day, the British adversarial system functions – after a fashion. Depending on the effectiveness or otherwise of Front Bench spokesmen, there is some kind of scrutiny of government performance – as, for example, John Prescott has recently shown in ...”

“... in Lincoln green gather in the forest round a bulky radiogram struggling to look like a TV set. ‘Robin was certainly impressed with the simulated teak finish.’ More of this could begin to diminish the effect. His peer and contemporary Handelsman does it with Greek myths, folk tales and ‘moments from history’ freaked with verbal witticisms, but Baxter ...”

“... Robin Cook’s memoir concentrates on the first two years of the second Blair government, from his ‘demotion’ to leader of the House immediately after the 2001 general election to his resignation over the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. He may have wanted to get the book out quickly while Iraq, WMDs and Hutton still dominate the headlines, but, more important, writing exclusively about the Blair second term allows him to construct a narrative of political disillusion shorn of awkward questions about the compromises that had been necessary for him to stay loyal to the New Labour ‘project’ before 2001 ...”