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“... Upstairs at the V&A exhibition, the layout is that of the digital panopticon. Arty photos – by David Hughes – are projected on the walls all around of the same ugly, theatrical dresses you can see life-size on display, worn by skinny department-store mannequins, with books and lampshades and hedges for faces. The fabrics themselves are digitally panoptic ...”

“... estimate rises to almost $5 trillion.* And that’s just the cost to the United States. Gordon Brown reserved £1 billion for the war. Britain has now spent more than £5 billion on ‘direct operating expenditures’ in Iraq, and Stiglitz and Bilmes predict that by 2010 the cost of the war will exceed £20 billion. Some of this money has come from a ...”

“... than a cobbled-together document designed to paper over the cracks long enough to prise Gordon Brown out of Downing Street. (He is also a little confused about timing: he gives the date of the formation of the coalition – ‘the most interesting political event I have witnessed’ – as May 2011, a year after it happened.) No doubt Clegg and Cameron ...”

“... poor might also wear cast-offs, but carefully patched – most colours faded to a drab greenish-brown, so the patches broadly matched the rest. Particular occupations – butchers, for example, or printing workers or locksmiths, were readily distinguishable from the stains on their aprons and clothes, and since both wigs and hair were worn plentifully ...”

“... that credit for Labour’s economic record and therefore electoral success has largely been due. Brown, indeed, had no choice, if he was not to be branded as disloyal to the party, but to help Blair into a third term of office by loosening the purse-strings to an extent that he might not otherwise have thought it prudent to do. A more effective parliamentary ...”

“... shove it into my own prose regardless of how tiresome that is. Take my last book, on the satirist David Sedaris. Not only do you get more Proust than you’d ever care for, you get an awful lot of Sedaris – pure, unadulterated Sedaris. It’s not that I’m lazy. Or rather, it’s not just that I’m lazy. I do much more in Sedaris than quote Sedaris, much ...”

“... I read under Hazel: ‘Fruit, a true nut, egg-shaped, up to 2cm long, pale green becoming brown with woody shell, enclosed in deeply and irregularly lobed involucre, nuts solitary or in clusters.’ I like the Joycean pedantry of that word for husk, ‘involucre’. Hazel is the tree of knowledge, ‘noble of the wood’, its Irish vernacular name is ...”

“... is illegally presented with a birthday cake. A Tory staffer throws up as the exit poll drops. David Cameron keeps his bladder full all night to achieve maximum focus during EU negotiations. The Bank of England takes emergency action to stave off financial panic following the ‘mini-budget’. David Bowie implores ...”

“... government to power.’ (Nor a Labour one, for that matter; the turning point for me came when David Miliband claimed that they’d been ‘punished enough’ for the Iraq War: ‘Well, you haven’t actually been voted out of office,’ I growled.) The gloom quickly gave way to a sense of the advantages. For a start the voters might have fallen a little ...”

“... talent for making viscerally real what was for many readers the abstraction of slavery. As David Blight puts it in his excellent new biography, he ‘learned how to leave them weeping’.But the Narrative’s publication also threatened Douglass’s safety. He was still a slave who could legally be recaptured – easily, since the book identified him ...”

“... in the company of a boy, smaller and younger than ourselves, a fragile boy with ginger hair called David. I think we thought of him as ‘our boy’. We bossed him. Occasionally, when he didn’t walk straight or carry our bags or speak when we wanted him to, we’d slap him or hit his hands with a ruler. We had to pass through fields to get to school, with ...”

“... to put together an anthology of Parliamentary applications for Private Eye’s Order of the Brown Nose would stumble before long on an obsequious supplementary question from David Evans, one of the very first Tories to make a million out of privatisation (in his case from rubbish collection). Again and again, at Prime ...”

“... frequently); others where what is special is an eerie suburban ordinariness (David Lynch’s small-town America). Doig’s landscapes, to a greater degree than most you might include in an anthology of painted and filmed scenery, suggest a surprising discovery about to be made, rather than something that’s been imposed on an amenable ...”

“... is a serious exhibition.1 The pictures themselves signal it with heavy colour: first, black, grey, brown, mud and rust, and, in later pictures strong reds and yellows (when he could afford it – earth colours are cheap). Thick paint – in early pictures so thick that it seems to parody all its Expressionist precursors – and wide strokes add weight to the ...”

“... In some cases the viewer becomes like the figure that stands dwarfed in the foreground of Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea, which is reproduced in the catalogue alongside Kleist’s reaction to it: ‘It was like someone having their eyelids cut off.’ Even landscape can be painfully revealing. The German connection is important, but if one lists ...”