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“... couldn’t be sure, you could only surmise. But then surmising is the bedrock of the bawdy music-hall humour that the upper-middle-class mandarins at the BBC were trying to proscribe in the 1930s, and which the popular press has always claimed as its justification – providing traditional entertainment for the working classes, just like Chaucer and ...”

“... 31 December 2009, Yorkshire. Call Rupert to the back door to watch a full moon coming up behind the trees at the end of the garden. It’s apparently a ‘blue moon’, i.e. the second full moon this month, which happens every two or three years. The next blue moon on New Year’s Eve won’t be until 2028 so it’s the last one I shall ever see – and it’s also the first that I ever knew about ...”

“... he painted out all the delegates, leaving only – set against the oppressive splendours of the Hall of Mirrors – a flag-draped coffin, guarded by two mad-looking half-nude soldiers in steel helmets, with two putti flying above carrying a wreath. This weird parody of a baroque funeral-monument (was it a joke? was it a ‘problem picture’?) was the hit ...”

“... for whom the main obstacle to a decent society appears so often to be the Old Left rather than Rupert Murdoch, feminists in the manner of Wolf and Paglia see the history and traditions of feminism itself as the largest barriers in the way of women’s greater freedom. Three years ago Camille Paglia told me that she had ‘single-handedly turned the ocean ...”

“... a napkin around her head and singing ‘Edelweiss’ at Natasha’s wedding, accompanied by Rupert Everett. On the other hand, Adler has a curious obsession with Vanessa’s second-rate film director husband, making this Tony Richardson’s story more than anyone else’s. He also thinks Belgrade is in Hungary, and his various errors make it hard to ...”

“... like most of what I thought of then as ‘good music’, at one of the concerts in Leeds Town Hall 1950-52. By mistake I put on the second disc first, and so hear not the slow introduction but a section of the recitative by the soul of Gerontius on seeing the angel at the start of Part 2. It is a member of that family of wondrous beings who, ere the ...”

“... fuck you up, your mum and dad’ recited by a thousand Girl Guides in the Royal Albert Hall.12 January. Read Macbeth for maybe the second time in my life (and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it). Much of the language is as opaque as I generally find Shakespeare but I’m struck by how soon he gets down to business, so that within a scene the play ...”

“... Gerald Steiner, which is as close as Wolfe’s prudent libel lawyers have allowed him to get to Rupert Murdoch and the New York Post. For a New Yorker like Wolfe, Murdoch evidently rates as a public emergency scarcely less serious than Aids. (Oddly, the only PWA in the novel is an anaemic English poet, called Lord Aubrey Buffing. Wolfe dislikes Brits.) A ...”

“... does occur; they hear his call, which leaves the air on the ‘dark stair’ and in the ‘empty hall’ of the ‘lone house’ ‘stirred and shaken’, while their failure to answer is experienced by the Traveller as a response in itself: ‘And he felt in his heart their strangeness,/Their stillness answering his cry.’ The parting command that he ...”

“... Although he rightly ridicules the ‘anti-establishment’ credentials of such figures as Rupert Murdoch, Paul Dacre and Guido Fawkes, he acknowledges that this is an establishment that has had experience of not being the establishment, although it has always drawn most (though, crucially, not all) of its membership from the ruling class. It ‘is ...”

“... 25 per cent to the Third and Fourth. Everyone in football knew that the new deal would be huge. Rupert Murdoch had worked out that buying exclusive rights to live football coverage was the only way to get an audience loyal enough to pay for a Sky subscription. Along with safety measures, Taylor had called for ‘the fullest reassessment of policy for the ...”

“... The Relation Ship, was published by his own Goliard Press in 1967. Three illustrations by Barry Hall. ‘Off-set printed, then blind-embossed and hand-coloured by the artist’. Four hundred and fifty copies hard-bound. ‘Ivory-tinted Glastonbury antique-laid paper’. Hairy boards (like one of Sonny Bono’s Flintstone-style waistcoats) and a tissue ...”

“... if only because their celibacy is optional (though ‘there should be a biretta in the hall rather than a perambulator,’ one character says, perhaps loath to encourage interfering clergy wives).On the fringe of the fiction and outside the social pale are the nonconformists and evangelicals with their egalitarianism and tin-roofed chapels. Roman ...”

“... in front of a wildly enthusiastic crowd of 13,000. Marine Le Pen could only dream of filling a hall that big. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leading candidate of the left, held a rally at the same time, also in the Paris suburbs, and attracted an audience a third of the size. There were many more young people – most of them men (and many maskless) – at ...”

“... of the kingdom, is 32. Across the peninsula, the majlis, the tribal equivalent of a fractious town-hall meeting, has been reduced to a perfunctory ceremony, if not abolished. Saudi petitioners no longer throng through the royal gates on Tuesdays and Fridays to share a meal with their leaders. The new rulers appear to their public on ubiquitous billboards, but ...”