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“... herself in the late 1950s one of only two women in the offices of the Observer, in charge of a page called ‘A Woman’s Perspective’. ‘I wondered,’ she recalled, ‘what were women’s subjects.’ Born in 1917, she had been brought up in the twilight of the Edwardian age in a world of nurseries and pinafores which felt like ‘the snuffing out of ...”

“... of German and Western European Jews who were murdered are dismissed in a little more than a page; sites of mass murder that lie outside Snyder’s ‘bloodlands’ and where the killings were not perpetrated by the Nazis or the Soviets are dealt with in equally perfunctory fashion. The 300,000 Serbs slaughtered by the fascist regime in Croatia, the ...”

“... our man is still scanning the horizon for nay-saying natives. To the not-entirely-lovely Norman Podhoretz, then editor of Commentary, who had presumably just asked Bellow for a piece: ‘And now tell me this: If you were described in someone’s magazine as a “burnt-out case” would you be at all inclined to contribute articles to that ...”

“... from Huntington’s, was soon after committed to the Central State Hospital for the Insane in Norman, Oklahoma; this was when young Woody started a-wandering. And then, in February 1947, Cathy, Guthrie’s daughter with his second wife, Marjorie Mazia, burned to death in a house fire caused by faulty wiring in a radio. The child was only four years ...”

“... shoes – frowning as she walked without hesitation across the room and introduced herself to Norman Mailer, whose book was being launched. At other parties I saw Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Stephen Spender and others, writers whose work I knew but whose faces (like those of most other writers) did not resemble the photographs on their book jackets. I ...”

“... exoneration or canonisation, but to live – with all the messiness that implied – on the page. What if she didn’t experience her own life as that of the concrete block feminist heroine I wanted her to be? And if I really hadn’t grown out of wanting to learn a lesson from her life, might the real lesson be the harder one – to value her life for ...”

“... Camouflage, ships painted in the disruptive ‘dazzle’ schemes developed by the British artist Norman Wilkinson were said to resemble ‘Cubist paintings on a colossal scale’. Yet the First World War was not merely history’s way of confirming Picasso’s genius, and the emergence of strategic camouflage didn’t represent a simple triumph of ...”

“... in St Paul’s, Brixton, Toxteth, Handsworth and many other places from 1980 to 1985. Almost every page is clouded by accounts of black people’s runins with the police and judiciary, social services and the teaching system. Predictably, words such as ‘hostility’ and ‘racism’ crop up a lot. Dutifully, the Phillipses tell few jokes. Windrush is guilty ...”

“... aggressive hosts. About the only relief he gets is when Daphna the welder’s wife sticks it to Norman Mailer in a big way. It is a triumphant section of the novel – comic, scary, vibrant, seething with observation. This is just what Israel feels like to the eight-day visitor (whether Roth will get any thanks when the book is read over there is an ...”

“... to him by a colonel in the Civil Affairs Division. By mid-September Bernays submitted a six-page scheme, the essential idea of which was to try, on a charge of conspiracy, not only the major war criminals, but also the organisations by which the Nazi state had carried out that conspiracy. Once these organisations had been judicially pronounced ...”

“... Nature, John Maddox, who does not take the prophets of ecological disaster seriously enough, and Norman St John-Stevas, who had the misfortune to let off one of the sillier arguments against abortion in Medawar’s hearing, and is briskly propelled across the Styx on page 24. Such are the citizens of Pluto’s republic: a ...”

“... is deliberately established with the doomed King Pentheus, of Euripides’s Bacchae, but the Norman King escapes ritual dismemberment and triumphs by admitting the Dionysian element in his own personality. This is indeed strange company for a contemporary novel to be keeping – but The Masque of St Eadmundsburg is a very strange book, which points to ...”

“... Appendix Eight, there is a demure asterisk corresponding to another asterisk at the bottom of the page. Published there, for all to see, are three words: ‘not being published’. Not being published! Why? The allegation is that terrorists and arms traffickers used British banks to conduct their illegal trade – and that the intelligence services were ...”

“... This evangelical Americanism was assisted not only by the ‘militant Christian’ belief, as Norman Mailer described it, that America is ‘the only force for good that can rectify the bad’. America’s presumed leadership of the free world also bred an atmosphere of solemn conformity among many of its expensively educated middle-class and ...”

“... Had It So Good, the first volume of his monumental history of Britain since 1956, big guns like Norman Tebbit continued to lambast ‘the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the 1960s’. Three years later, Thatcher blamed the 1960s for ‘“the ...”