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“... A doctor and former seminarian, Chris Adrian has over the past decade written three sprawling novels of unusual thematic scope and one collection of highly inventive short stories. His first novel, Gob’s Grief, was more varied in style and intent than some entire careers. Though it presents itself as an American Civil War picaresque (the opening line is: ‘Thomas Jefferson Woodhull was 11 years old when he ran away from home to join the Union army’), it gradually turns into a sort of steampunk horror story, featuring the reanimation of corpses and characters with names like The Urfeist and Colonel Blood ...”

“... can wait,’ their boss says. ‘There’s no harm.’ We see the four men – played by Adrian Rawlins, Hubert Burton, Oliver Chris and Alex Sharp – back on the train later, and they become something like the mind of the story, our way into what it thinks, as the narrator is in Ikiru. And they are what lasts ...”

“... Michael Heseltine was groping for a German-style developmental corporatism. Ministers like Chris Patten and Malcolm Rifkind were visibly at odds with New Right doctrine even before the change of government. John Major himself is, of course, an unknown quantity, but the opposition parties have succumbed to wishful thinking in assuming that he will be a ...”

“... joke, which is: ‘What’s round and hairy and goes up and down?’ ‘A gooseberry in a lift.’ Adrian Dangerous doesn’t get it. ‘How did a gooseberry get in a lift?’ he wants to know. ‘How do I know, it’s a fucking joke, it’s implicit.’ ‘Yuh, well, how does a fucking gooseberry push the button in the lift? Gooseberries don’t have ...”

“... Chinese scholars to our understanding. Articles by the anthropologists Ildiko Bellér Hann and Chris Hann, based on their fieldwork in Xinjiang, have now been collected in The Great Dispossession, which provides insights into the history, economy and society of Xinjiang, and above all into the role of Islam. It highlights the struggle of the Uyghurs to ...”

“... is the case. The response of Unionist politicians to McDaid’s murder spoke eloquently enough. Adrian McQuillan, the local DUP councillor, explained that the mob had been ‘provoked’ by the flying of Irish flags in the area: ‘What reason can you see for there being tricolours up yesterday afternoon, a Sunday afternoon? None other than for to get a ...”

“... Chris Ware’s new book, Building Stories, isn’t a book at all. It’s a cardboard box, about the size of a board game, covered in bright, blocky illustrations and stuffed with comics. A couple of these are hardbound: one in plain charcoal grey; one with a picture of a girl on the cover, drawing. The rest are paper: some the size of the Beano, some as big as old broadsheets – one is done up as a newspaper for bees, called the Daily Bee, motto ‘God Save the Queen ...”

“... Stein, in Alice B. Toklas mode, fauxnaive and paratactic, artless and kooky, the godmother of Adrian Mole. But his favourite art critic, as he admits in It Hurts, his book about the New York art scene, is Clement Greenberg, and he can suddenly throw out a shrewd, decisive insight in the master’s best manner. His claims on art’s behalf are modest and ...”

“... appropriated by a new group of graphic novelists: Asian Americans, most notably Gene Luen Yang and Adrian Tomine. For Yang and Tomine, the canonical writer of Jewish assimilation is Babel’s American heir, Philip Roth, who transplanted the sphere of action from war to dating. Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006) relates the adventures of a Chinese boy called ...”

“... opportunity for middle-class men to dabble in working-class cultural pursuits and behaviours. As Adrian Tempany details expertly in And the Sun Shines Now (2016), football underwent a complete political overhaul between the Hillsborough disaster of 1989 and the mass euphoria of the 1996 European Championship, held in England, which corresponded to a steady ...”

“... of the Kershaw report). Since 1 September last year, Park View has had a new executive principal, Adrian Packer, who was previously the head of Everton Free School in Liverpool, which is sponsored by the football club. Before that, he was head of music theatre at the Brit School in Croydon, where he taught Amy Winehouse and Jessie J. When I talked to him in ...”