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“... hot, and the music was very loud, and I soon began to feel woozy, as if I were drunk on Pernod and black. I vaguely remember some preaching, something probably about Who, then, can separate us from the love of Christ? Can trouble do it, or hardship or persecution or hunger or poverty or danger or death? (Romans 8.35), a good preaching text. What I do remember ...”

“... espionage is at hand in Devil May Care, the new James Bond novel by Sebastian Faulks ‘writing as Ian Fleming’ (Penguin, £18.99). ‘Picking up where Fleming left off’ when he died in 1964, Faulks transports his readers back to a time when men were men (or at least Bond was), women could escape from prison by flashing their breasts at a jailer, SIS was ...”

“... it. They’d had their chance. He sank back in his chair, mouth twisted tight, and willed on a black depression. This is from the National Service novel, The Camp, in which the would-be Glasgow hard man encounters a barracks load of actual Glasgow hard men. Williams’s ambivalence here reminds me of what happened to my own patriotism on my first visit to ...”

“... with its proprietor’s economic interests and opinions, and the Telegraph, owned then by Conrad Black, a Canadian by birth, reflected Black’s far right American views. Both Murdoch and Black were and are extreme Europhobes. Major resigned on the morning of his defeat in 1997. His ...”

“... Practitioners of the black arts of journalism will universally acknowledge that the most accurate as well as the funniest portrayal of their profession is Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Scoop. No one who has ever worked for a paper with a baronial proprietor could fail to recognise Lord Copper and his bevvy of fawning executives ...”

“... the English public school as a model. Pupils played cricket, rugby, hockey and tennis; its black school blazer carried a complicated heraldic crest – two lions rampant argent, a cross flory, four martlets or and two trefoils or – with the school’s motto, ‘Labor Omnia Vincit’, embroidered above and the less easily translated ‘Quidquid Agis ...”

“... various dashing and extant English aristocrats, including Andrew Parker Bowles. Rupert Campbell-Black, wealthy landowner, sometime world champion showjumper, sometime Tory MP and sports minister, exuder of brio, glamour and charisma, is an all-round amoral charmer and shit, immune to scandal and opinion, and the envy of lesser men. Tony ‘didn’t know ...”

“... Times and TV Times each week with a marker pen obliterating any programme listing that included black or Irish people, gays, lesbians or David Frost’. The relationship cooled when Ken junior joined the Labour Party and ceased completely when he became leader of the Greater London Council, but for a time they lived under the same roof in an intimate and ...”

“... in a wicker chair, checking a page in his typewriter. The picture appears on the covers both of Ian Hamilton’s Writers in Hollywood and of Tom Dardis’s Some Time in the Sun and instantly announces several elements of a familiar legend. Even in black and white the image is full of warm shadows, and the uncropped ...”

“... are combative on this point, and so united that they frequently refer to themselves as ‘Jack&Ian’. To this winsome dyad the notion of astrobiology is limiting in that it stands for astronomy as seen from Earth plus Earth-style biology, so that its thinking is governed by anthropic concerns such as the search for ‘habitable zones’ elsewhere in our ...”

“... show is over that you register what hasn’t been treated with contempt. Women’s lib, gay pride, black power – indeed any cause likely to be favoured by the average ‘silly fucker’ from Islington or Hampstead. Such audiences don’t mind being mocked for their yoghurt and stripped pine – but it might have been a different story if The Comic Strip had ...”

“... to wax nostalgic. He is quite good on computers. He emphasises the way that in daily life they are black boxes. No one knows how they work. The value of technological innovation for its own human sake is too often overlooked, since no one understands it any more. Part of his message is that, at least in popular culture, no one cares about the hardware, which ...”

“... quilts. Eggers maintains that this gimmickry is ‘simply a device, a defence, to obscure the black, blinding, murderous rage and sorrow at the core of this whole story’, and he may be right. What’s ultimately impressive about the book is not its half-assed PoMo comedy – which you can now find in virtually any novel of any genre, except possibly ...”

“... by white Americans, and are constantly nudged towards thinking of IQ as being a cause. Move on. Black people on average have lower IQ than white ones. Therefore there are a lot of causal factors in their make-up which, collectively, they cannot escape. That is a bald way in which to describe the logic of the book. Yes, the authors constantly insert ...”

“... by what Michael Heseltine calls ‘our North American press’ – that is to say, the Murdoch and Black empires – against Britain forging closer ties in Europe. As Conrad Black has lived here for a dozen years, obviously cares about the country and does not own a British tabloid, it is a little unfair to bracket him with ...”