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“... lords and religious blackmail by demagogic preachers, could look to all sorts of advantages. As Alexander Murdoch points out, it was ‘parity’ with England, not assimilation to the English governmental machine, that the top-brass Scots wanted. At intervals, they would speak of the need to ‘compleat’ the Union, by which they meant not the ...”

“... The first thing Alzheimer’s disease took away from Iris Murdoch was her luminous powers. At a conference in Israel in 1994, she was unable to answer her audience’s questions. In 1995, she completed, with great difficulty, her 27th novel, Jackson’s Dilemma, in which readers found several errors and inconsistencies; it was to be her last ...”

“... The leading figures in all these books are well-known, and are located in a period of conspicuous intellectual activity in the Scotland of the mid and late 18th century. This was the time when the modern social sciences were created as areas of legitimate study, much of their content for the use of teenage university students. There was also a modest literary revival ...”

“... Council. Both these comments were made about the recent takeover of Today newspaper by Rupert Murdoch. Unbelievably, the first came from a speech in the House of Commons in defence of the takeover. Stripped of the technical and financial arguments that would have accompanied a reference up to the Monopolies Commission, the Government case was that, like ...”

“... over which Amis’s pencil, his lifting gear, hovers and is regretfully withdrawn. Iris Murdoch makes a futile attempt to avoid cliché by using inverted commas: ‘the wrong end of the stick’, ‘worthwhile activities’. But you can’t slip away as easily as that: ‘a cliché or an approximation, wedged between inverted commas, is still a ...”

“... ancients, the white carthorse on the steps of Number Ten is dust with Bellerophon, the horse of Alexander. A cruel memory of that age lingers, the TUC trip to Poland at the height of Party-military repression in that country. It was a jaunt which the EEPTU opposed – violently of course, it never did things otherwise – which Mr Basnett approved and of ...”

“... penny, out of distaste for newspapers that was not entirely to do with the newly-tyrannical Murdoch, I wanted to produce, for myself alone, a work that was one hundred per cent fiction. I could not think of any novel of which I could say that I had enjoyed every word. Not even The Three Musketeers. There always seem to be bits the authors have ...”

“... Alexander reminded me that Black once said that he was prepared to let his editors have a completely free hand except on one subject. He forbade attacks on American Presidents in general and President Reagan in particular. Entry for 18 April 1986, Not Many Dead The success of Michael Moore’s film about Roger Smith and General Motors has aroused an envious spirit of emulation in my breast ...”

“... as he met Alastair Campbell, he knew that he had ‘clanking great balls’. He admires Rupert Murdoch for the same reason: ‘He was an outsider, and he had balls.’ He also admires women who might be said to have balls, like Kate Garvey, his diary secretary: ‘She ran the diary with a grip of iron and was quite prepared to squeeze the balls … of ...”

“... There have been some unexpected successes. The Evening Standard was bought by the former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev, and turned into a freesheet. This at the time seemed to me the craziest idea anyone in the business has ever had, turning a paying product into something that you just give away, and hoping that the increased (though free) circulation causes a ...”

“... her right. Perhaps she didn’t feel she had been well seated. Never mind; I was able to introduce Alexander Hitchens to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, both of whom were very nice to him, as was Jessica Lange and as were Uma Thurman and Oprah Winfrey. His only autograph refusal came from Jane Fonda. I was impressed by how many people didn’t go ...”

“... of this realisation came his interest in such non-cowardly homosexuals as T.E. Lawrence (Ross) and Alexander the Great (Adventure Story). But perhaps the question to be asked is: why should a heterosexual writer adopt a gay point of view? What’s the benefit, not to the person, but to the novel? There needs to be some novelistic payoff, if we accept that the ...”

“... which she would have enjoyed. The Tories have been getting into tangles. Her eight-year-old son Alexander has invented an amiably malevolent game called Killer Baby. And Angela Carter has turned into a celebrity. Her reputation has soared like her trapeze-artist heroine Fevvers, the ‘Cockney Venus’ of Nights at the Circus, ‘shaking out about her those ...”

“... only as ‘tragic warnings’. For the use of a character as a model, it would be hard to beat Alexander’s deliberate and well-documented modelling of himself on Achilles. For Alexander, the epic was sufficient to ‘trigger desire and excite identification’ in the manner Warner attributes only to modern ...”

“... John Rodker) was discounted, along with the social realists (Robert Westerby, James Curtis, Alexander Baron), who remain trapped in a ghetto of unfashionable leftist politics and unfashionable locations. The locations – Whitechapel, Notting Hill – have recovered, but the politics have evaporated like a puddle on hot tarmac. We can’t afford to ...”