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“... The world​ is often just about to end in Sarah Hall’s fiction. In The Carhullan Army (2007), England is in a state of political and ecological collapse. ‘You don’t believe the world can really be broken or that anything terrible will happen during your lifetime,’ the narrator reflects. But the unimaginable soon begins to feel inevitable: ‘You just know when the world is about to break apart ...”

“... she must have presented to our parents when she welcomed them loudly in the large stone-flagged hall, every corner of which would have in it on a rainy day a girl standing with her face turned to the wall. I can still remember clearly my first night at Ripley Hall, after Miss Leefield’s laugh had ceased and the last ...”

“... book would have to be written on a laptop that had no internet access. When I arrived at Ellingham Hall Assange was fast asleep. He’d been living there, at the house of Vaughan Smith, one of his sureties and founder of the Frontline Club, since his arrest on Swedish rape allegations. He was effectively under house arrest and wearing an electronic tag on his ...”

“... of equal ability and charm. The winter season of chamber music has started both at the Wigmore Hall and with the City Music Society. The Wigmore Hall has inaugurated a season of concerts on a Sunday morning which conclude with a glass of sherry for free. One Sunday recently I heard a Beethoven string septet which was new ...”

“... The memoirs of Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, are among the more remarkable documents of the 18th century. Begun by 1704, they were written, rewritten and ghostwritten over three decades before publication in 1742. An Account of the Conduct of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough, from Her First Coming to Court to the Year 1710 was a none too subtle attempt at vindicating her brief period as favourite to Queen Anne, justifying her personal and political roles, refuting slanders against her and her warrior husband, and defaming her enemies, both dead and alive ...”

“... irrepressible love and paralysing grief – but it is still more about the analysis of feeling. Sarah Durham (‘a good sensible name for a sensible woman’) is a theatrical producer, 65 years old. Calm, reasonable and successful, she imagines that the storms of adolescence and middle age are behind her. A voice from the past disturbs this cultivated ...”

“... other than a normal way for the patriarchs of a respectable middle-class family to behave. Sarah Waters’s novels – the first three set in the Victorian era, the more recent two in the 1940s – have always been interested in the ways in which English society has disposed of its more awkward or inconvenient members by locking them away in various ...”

“... in what her Lover says to her, than the good Opinion her Passion has made her conceive of him’); Sarah Fielding’s deeply unpleasant David Simple (1744), in which characters with names like Spatter, Lady Know-All and Mr Varnish assail the gormless hero until he drops dead of despair; and Sarah Scott’s thoroughly ...”

“... chill on the balcony, only he left again just after ten, the bottle’s still on the floor in the hall, but before he went I sat down with him on the sofa for a bit, Ciro with his big belly, he asked me to, Come here, he said, and patted the cushion beside him, he was the one I knew best out of everyone there, and he told me about the two women he was ...”

“... yet to reach his apotheosis with the life peerage that validated his sobriquet, Lord Toad of Tote Hall. Confidant of Margaret Thatcher, columnist in the News of the World, professional diner-out and social climber, Wyatt spotted his opportunity. His diary would be a secret but was, from the outset, intended for publication. Its rationale was as a nice little ...”

“... The latest wave of the Scandinavian crime invasion: Sarah Lund and her woolly jumpers. The Killing, the powerfully addictive Danish crime drama running on BBC4 on Saturday nights, has become the latest TV series to inspire a devoted, evangelical following, just as it did in Denmark when it was first broadcast in 2007 under the name Forbrydelsen (‘the crime ...”

“... consummate performer. Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, was said to have an ‘almost music-hall style of speaking’, while his son greatly admired the music-hall comic Dan Leno and would sing his songs with what this book enigmatically describes as ‘teddy bear gestures’. Harold Macmillan could do a superb ...”

“... called the Wordsworths, a brother and sister, about whom Sam was wildly enthusiastic but whom Sarah correctly divined to be a dire threat. What was so objectionable about these Wordsworths? Well, to begin with they were so quietly but insufferably pleased with themselves, so convinced that they represented sensibility in its highest form. Then William was ...”

“... of this is new. There has always been a ‘push and pull’, as he puts it, between COBA, City Hall, the federal courts, lawyers, activists, incarcerated people and public opinion. Shanahan was himself briefly detained on Rikers, in 2014, after taking part in a protest against the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. His book is an ...”

“... Sarah Palin has put a new face and voice to the long-standing, powerful, but inchoate movement in US political life that one might see as a mutant variety of Poujadism, inflected with a modern American accent. There are echoes of the Poujadist agenda of 1950s France in its contempt for metropolitan elites, fuelling the resentment of the provinces towards the capital and the countryside towards the city, in its xenophobic strain of nationalism, sturdy, paysan resistance to taxation, hostility to big business, and conviction that politicians are out to exploit the common man ...”