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“... Joanne Catherall and Phil Oakey of the Human League performing in 1982. Iwas​ in Skegness the weekend Britain left the EU. It was raining, and a cold, hard breeze was blowing in from the North Sea. At Butlin’s, in a huge tent filled with burger bars and dayglo cocktails, the Brexiteers were dancing to 1980s pop music and getting excited. A number of drunk men were dressed as St George, wearing England flags and Crusader helmets ...”

“... deceit. ‘I don’t know how I can demonstrate my remorse,’ Glass is reported to have said to Andrew Sullivan, the editor who hired him. Sullivan pointed out, not in so many words, that taking a giant book advance and allowing a film to be made from the story of your misdemeanours might not be the subtlest demonstration of remorse. Next came Jayson Blair ...”

“... enable me to discharge it without improper interference. I look forward to that day.’ 11. Dara O’Hagan was Mrs Nelson’s best friend. She lives in a housing estate near the Shore Road at the top of Lurgan. She is a councillor: the Sinn Fein member for Upper Bann. Her house has the clean and orderly look of many such houses: carpets for comfort, vertical ...”

“... In the mid-Eighties, my family felt everything would be fine if I could just get something with a shirt and tie. My three elder brothers wore nailbags, overalls and aprons – the respective black robes of time-served apprenticeship – but even that world was going by the time it got to be my turn, and it was hoped that I might be found fit for the crisp shirt and tie of the clerical elect ...”

“... My mother’s​ right hand ended in a cloth. She cleaned the local school from six a.m. and again in the evening, doing a chip shop in between. I got to know all the women. They were presided over by a series of delinquent janitors. (One of them was running guns for Ulster. Another stole video equipment. The older one was a kiddie-fiddler etc.) I used to go after school to help my mum with the mopping and use the library ...”

“... Modern​ Hollywood isn’t really Hollywood – it’s Calabasas. With everyone now the David O. Selznick of his own social picture, gossip replaced with tweets, and fan magazines with selfies, the grandeur of old Hollywood can seem mythical. Like proper myths, its stories are almost exclusively about metamorphosis, self-destruction and things going wrong, but they are at least stories as opposed to advertisements ...”

“... One of the general effects of hero-worship is its tendency to marshal resentment in those who claim themselves no party to the admiration. A good example of this offers itself at the opening of Vanity Fair – ‘A Novel without a Hero’ – when the single-minded Becky Sharp, high in a coach bound for Russell Square, flings a copy of Johnson’s Dictionary out of the window to land on the grass at the feet of her former teacher, a sworn disciple of the Great Lexicographer ...”

“... If you watch The Simpsons or South Park – cartoon serials where gangs of doodles get to demonstrate the wisdom in modern stupidity – you come to feel that the characters are really doing something quite old-fashioned. They may be media savvy and product-articulate, these yellow-faced goons, but in essence they go in for the kind of stuff that used to have people rolling in the aisles of the music halls ...”

“... In every great novelist there’s a baby, a slack-mouthed tyrant, a bawling and mewling ankle-biter, a demon chomper, a rattle-chucker, a rivalrous toad, green and pink and fat with self-concern, and we will often see this distinguished person most clearly in his letters. Saul Bellow knew the type very well and we meet one of them in the shape of Moses Herzog, the eponymous hero of Bellow’s sixth novel, a helpless, epistolary nutcase who yawps as if his nappies were as heavy as his brain ...”

“... In a way he was like the country he lived in, everything came too easily to him.’ Mrs McFarlane told me she heard someone say this in a movie. There was nothing in the movie that wasn’t just rubbish, she said. But the afternoon she heard those people talking on the screen it made her upset and she said it was bad for her to get upset. It was all to do with the Living Channel ...”

“... Today there are only second acts in American lives. No generation to find itself interestingly lost in Paris; no elegant tribe crowding the lawn with portents of disaster at Gatsby’s parties; no collective urge to write the great war novel; no second sex. To judge by the best of the new writing, the most urgent of the new films, the most-watched television, American lives are now devoted to a wholesale inhabitating of the dead afternoon ...”

“... If you want to know what is happening in the mind of the average teenage boy you must follow the action of his thumbs, because the eager digits that might once have flicked through the pages of Hotspur or Penthouse are now more likely to be employed in a fight against universal evil in one of its modern guises. Last year saw the greatest ever increase in sales of computer games, to the point where the world’s biggest titles – Halo 3, for example – reliably bring in more cash than most blockbuster movies ...”

“... Penguins​ are super-parents. When the female provides dinner she doesn’t just reach for the pesto but launches herself into the treacherous, icy depths, returning with a stomach full of half-digested fish to be spewed down the gullet of her needy chick, His Fluffy Eminence, who is then installed in a creche so protective it makes the average nursery look like the workhouse in Oliver Twist ...”

“... he looks at Ford is the elegiac element in his westerns, the way his static camera summons what Andrew Sarris has called ‘his feelings of loss and displacement already fantasised through the genre’. The Old West is a vista of mourning, yet the films are about the funny and mysterious and sometimes savage ways that people survive there and go on to make ...”

“... colour, grace and music. Here he is at 15, writing a wee squib about the Pentland Rising: Master Andrew Murray, an outed minister, residing in the Potterrow, on the morning after the defeat, heard the sounds of cheering and the march of many feet beneath his window. He gazed out. With colours flying, and with music sounding, Dalzell, victorious, entered ...”