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“... At the close of the Fifties, the New Left put on a mass meeting in London, at which the star speaker was Isaac Deutscher and the slogan was ‘Into the Red Sixties’. At the close of the Seventies, there was a much-anticipated rally in Central Hall, Westminster, unironically billed as ‘The Debate of the Decade’, between Tony Benn and the leaders of the supposed British extra-parliamentary opposition ...”

“... Like much of Rick Moody’s previous work, Purple America charts the lives of the ‘slovenly, affluent’ young. It’s not an especially good life. Moody’s characters are distinctly unhappy, unformed, unable to proceed with their lives in anything like a reasonable way. Instead, they gradually succumb to a set of local problems ...”

“... When he published The Ice Storm in 1994, Rick Moody seemed to be looking for a workable compromise between suburban realism and what Gore Vidal once called the ‘Research and Development’ arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on ...”

“... coalition operations in the first Gulf War. (In Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War, Rick Atkinson recounts the complaints of Schwarzkopf’s main deputy in Saudi Arabia about the ‘tirades, the histrionics, the regal trappings’ of America’s most celebrated general.) The US military authorities appreciated Sale’s work. One admiral even ...”

“... of the Great Powers, 1988 (subtitle, ‘Economic Change and Military Conflict, 1500-2000’), or Simon Schama’s Citizens, 1989. At first glance it looks as if the reader gets a smaller return, a mere 15 years of history at a point when, on the face of it, nothing dramatic was happening. In fact, the big problems Johnson offers to explain prove ...”

“... a passage that has mysteriously disappeared from the British edition, she tells how the US senator Rick Santorum became near-apoplectic (literally) on the Senate floor while talking about his refusal to let his wife have a late-stage abortion when her life was in danger. (Mrs Santorum survived, although the infant was stillborn.) Congresswoman Patricia ...”