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“... reproaches is embarrassing. She is a wonderfully clear-sighted writer, innately courteous, like Ruth Prawer Jhabvala or E.M. Forster, to the creatures of her imagination. It is foolhardy of her, though, to take on Kafka, whose work remains a set text for any examination on the 20th century. Both Robert Plunket and Dirk Bogarde tell tall tales from Los ...”

“... On 26 September, he nominated Amy Coney Barrett to fill the seat on the court vacated by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and pushed her to be confirmed quickly by the Republican majority in the Senate. The next day brought an engrossing and carefully documented New York Times story by Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire detailing Trump’s ...”

“... pantheon. She has won prestigious awards by the armful: she was recently nominated for the first International Man Booker Prize for career achievement, alongside Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Gabriel García Márquez, Margaret Atwood et al. Consequently, it is sometimes seen as surprising that she is so little read in Britain. Her formidable essays have ...”

“... arise when the person he calls ‘the party’ – as in Groucho Marx’s ‘party of the first part’ – manages to surprise in the middle of the night an official who is not the one assigned to his case but nevertheless has some competence in the matter. K is already half-asleep, but able to hear most of this. ‘You think this can never ...”

“... from off-the-record interviews with many of the dramatis personae in Theresa May’s topsy-turvy first year as prime minister. There is much here that leaves the reader uneasy – including a portent of our stodgy post-Brexit future, the potatoes served with lasagne at a Chequers lunch. Those who follow politics are used to reading about its adrenalin-driven ...”

“... where he had been a professor since 1897, he trained a generation of anthropologists; after the First World War he also taught at Barnard, the women’s college affiliated with Columbia. And although he was himself certainly a public figure – he once appeared on the cover of Time – it was his Barnard students who became truly ubiquitous in American ...”

“... years later, she realised ‘with dismay that I wasn’t like it any longer’: ‘It was the first time I was aware of time, change and the longing for the past. I was nine years of age.’ The memory of the dress – ‘over and over I would remember that magic dress’ – worn for the first time with a frangipani ...”

“... meaning and became something that a woman would rather not be called. In the instructions for the first Schools Broadcast I wrote, in the days of crackling wireless sets in stuffy village schools, the producer called her ‘splendid’. Because of the crackle, we weren’t allowed sound-effects, certainly not the ‘thunder of the foaming, flying Ogowé ...”

“... magazine: ‘I believe very strongly in fascism,’ he said. ‘Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.’ In August, Eric Clapton took a break from a performance in Birmingham to demand the repatriation of Britain’s immigrant and black population. ‘You should all just leave,’ he said to members of his audience. ‘Not just leave the ...”

“... and the poems, too, can be read as something like works of criticism. Many critics see ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ as the earliest evidence of Keats’s genius, and the sonnet treats with Renaissance magnificence that peculiarly modern subject, the poet as reader of poetry. Or again, the remarkable fragment which, only two and a half ...”

“... of Discontent, the demoralisation of the Callaghan Government, its fall and electoral defeat, the first year of the Thatcher Government. They also cover the rise of Benn: not in the Government itself, where it is clear he was marginalised both by Callaghan and his own actions, but in the wider Labour movement. He calls Part Six of the book (May 1979-May ...”

“... stomach ‘gavotting and rumbling as I ran from the main terminal to the domestic one in Rome’. Ruth Reichl, one of the best of the recent food memoirists – she is the author of the trilogy Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me with Apples and Garlic and Sapphires – describes an uneaten airline meal as she flies from LA to New York on her way to take up a job ...”

“... crosses and black candles, I don’t doubt that he would. In an epigraph over his preface – the first words in the book, effectively – he quotes an oblique little exchange from Waiting for Godot: Estragon: All the dead voices. Vladimir: To be dead is not enough for them. I suppose this must be meant as a nod to Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete ...”

“... affinity with the blood brotherhood’ of the thugs. While Merchant’s sometime collaborators (Ruth Prawer Jhabvala as well as James Ivory) seem to have winced when faced with the chief plot premise – that an upper-class Englishman could effortlessly pass himself off as a lower-class Indian – Merchant himself was convinced that this was ‘a matter of ...”

“... Robert Harris’s first novel, Fatherland (1992), was a counterfactual historical thriller set in Nazi Germany in 1964. In the alternative reality of the book, Germany defeated the Soviet Union in the Caucasus in 1943, lured the Royal Navy to its destruction after learning that the British had cracked the Enigma code, and intimidated the United States into signing a peace treaty by successfully testing an atom bomb and launching an intercontinental V3 rocket across the Atlantic ...”