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“... oughtn’t they to be prepared to take it either way? I know that’s easy to say, and I remember Jonathan Miller once telling me, and convincingly so, that nobody to whom it hasn’t happened can know how peculiarly disagreeable it is to be lampooned in print. But as Goethe said, and I quoted to the famous Jonathan on ...”

“... of the bank’s pro-capitalist deflationary policies and the resulting unemployment. When Gordon Brown returned operational independence over monetary policy to the bank in 1997, so that it could set interest rates without political interference, he was signalling New Labour’s distance from the socialist arguments that had led to the bank’s ...”

“... is the fear of hordes of lawless immigrants on the doorstep; in areas where there are few black or brown faces, it is fear of the unknown, fed by tales from the ghettos. That fear has turned the National Front from a fringe movement at the start of the Eighties into France’s fourth strongest political grouping. There is still an understandable but mistaken ...”

“... Old Glory – the book written by Jonathan Raban – is an altogether different book from the Old Glory that was praised in the reviews, but it is no less wonderful for that. The book the reviewers wrote about does not exist at all, except as the ghost of an intention. This phantasmal Old Glory is the book which Raban originally planned to write, and which he expected would be little more than an elegant travel diary: the record of a passive drifting journey down the Mississippi in the track of Huckleberry Finn ...”

“... Conan Doyle, whom one expects to sound like Basil Rathbone. In actual fact he sounds like Gordon Brown. It’s somehow easy to forget that Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, and his voice, recorded in 1930, is here filled with lilting plangencies about the age of materialism and the fact that death is not the end. He was right about that, about death not ...”

“... the modernist and postmodernist masters, these writers – among them Eugenides’s contemporary Jonathan Franzen and a younger cohort that includes Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers – have come to believe that too much was lost – in moral and emotional engagement, in readership – when realism was thrown over. As Franzen wrote in the New Yorker, ‘in ...”

“... Travelling,’ Jonathan Raban once remarked, ‘is inherently a plotless, disordered, chaotic affair, where writing insists on connection, order, plot, signification.’ Even the best contemporary travel writing is haunted by the self-consciousness that grows out of this contradiction. It’s embarrassing to read about seemingly spontaneous encounters with exotic people in far-flung countries, and then suddenly to remember that the whole thing has been set up just so the author can convert it into so much copy for his or her book ...”

“... thoughts, Billy picks up not words but sensations: ‘The scent of warm milk, the smooth brown feathers of an owl in James’s favourite book, the thump of a rubber ball against a wooden floor’. James is altogether that minor miracle of fiction, a believable baby. A Home at the End of the World is a novel which fully deserves the acclaim it has ...”

“... Jonathan Meades, for the last thirty years Britain’s most consistently surprising and informative writer on the built environment, has finally published a book on the subject. A volume did appear in 1988 – English Extremists, written with Deyan Sudjic and Peter Cook, celebrating the postmodern architects Campbell Zogolovitch Wilson Gough – but since then his medium has been television ...”

“... He faced two serious and determined enemies during his time in Downing Street: al-Qaida and Gordon Brown. One, he concluded, represented a force so strong and rooted that it had to be uprooted and destroyed, since confrontation was inevitable; the only question was when and how. The other had to be contained, because stepping over the line would have been ...”

“... Fucking Theories. James Harkin’s Niche: Why the Market No Longer Favours the Mainstream (Little, Brown, £13.99) puts forward the hypothesis that between the 1930s and the end of the 20th century in ‘retail, media and politics’ in North America and Western Europe there was something called the ‘mainstream’, which is now in terminal decline, ceding ...”

“... They had a vegetable garden, a hog pen, a chicken coop. Redding’s most recent biographer, Jonathan Gould, says that Otis (14 at the time) ‘felt a special disdain for anything that smacked of “country”, flatly refusing to wear the overalls his parents bought for him’. Four years later, the house burned to the ground and the Reddings moved back ...”

“... in silence, refusing to answer reporters’ questions: it ‘looked like a perp walk’, Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian. ‘He isn’t playing the game,’ the Times journalist Jenni Russell complained on Newsnight. It was a metaphor, and it wasn’t. Corbyn was being tested: not on his policies, which have hardly been at issue so far, but ...”

“... on their rucksacks as they criss-crossed Europe meeting up with pen pals and old army buddies. Jonathan Purkis, a self-described ‘vagabond sociologist’, sees hitchhiking as the inheritor of a long tradition celebrating self-sufficient travel, dating back to Lao Tzu’s aphorisms (the journey as more important than the destination) and medieval ...”

“... Liz Jones piece. This should be a resignation matter,’ James Ball of the Guardian tweeted. Jonathan Haynes, also of the Guardian, described it as a ‘JAW-DROPPINGLY irresponsible and stupid paragraph on suicide from Liz Jones. Cannot believe MoS have published it.’ Did she really not care how many vulnerable people might be induced to commit suicide ...”