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“... Gothic horror tale, detective mystery, autobiography, political history: Jonathan Coe’s appealingly ambitious new novel involves a promiscuous intermingling of literary genres, as a potted social history of Thatcherism is tucked inside some meta-textual high jinks. An anatomy of the appalling Winshaw family, Thatcherite predators of one ilk or another, provides the lens for a scabrous critique of Tory Britain; but at the source of the family’s history lies a mysterious murder, so that the text simultaneously yields us a camped-up whodunnit ...”

“... the Taliban hadn’t had the funds to build any new schools in the two years they had held power in Kandahar. Women would be allowed to work outside the home once the war was over. Stoning was the punishment for adultery, with the man put into a sack and the woman, in her burqa, placed in a pit up to her waist before the crowd pitched in. It was an ...”

“... the widespread amusement which it evidently has. There is, admittedly, an underlying theme about power, propaganda and patronage (of which more anon). But I have neither the ambition nor the talent to be a serious chronicler de nos jours. The only time in my life I tried to do a Boswell was after an evening on which Elias Canetti had unexpectedly invited ...”

“... conflict, rapid social change, war, revolution, economic depression, shifting borders and great power conflict, Jews faced mounting friction at every point of contact with the world around them. Did the Poles co-operate in the extermination of the Jews? Dr Datner has to admit that they did: but they also saved Jews. No survivor survived without help, often ...”

“... writers from the Republic to be ‘somehow obsessed with its relationship with a former colonial power ... It is simply not possible to allow a phrase like “post-colonial literature” still to wander about like a decomposing chicken in search of its head, and to have it foisted upon the backs of younger writers.’ And while recognising the ‘major and ...”

“... was a cesspit of ‘Old Corruption’ – so rotten and self-serving in its greed for power and money that it must be purged. This was really an English variant on Jacobinism. A vast amount of government activity over the last two hundred years is best viewed as a slow, stealthy attempt at outsmarting these two always latent utopian cries, through ...”

“... It was said of the Soong sisters that Ailing loved money, Qingling loved China and Meiling loved power. Her marriage to Chiang in 1927 (his third, her first) was her path to the top. It came after the Kuomintang forces he led had fought their way from the south to the Yangtze in 1926-27 and were about to march on to defeat – or enter into an alliance with ...”

“... do wisely … when in a Crowd, to amuse the Mob by Quarrels,’ Henry Fielding’s master-criminal Jonathan Wild advises his gang, ‘that while they are listening to your Jargon, you may with the greater Ease and Safety, pick their Pockets.’ In The Beggar’s Opera (1728), Peachum, a thief-catcher, surveys with Lockit the jail-keeper their cache of stolen ...”

“... energised his writing. During the reign of Queen Anne, when he briefly walked the corridors of power, he looked in one view like a Whig in Ireland but a Tory in England, in another like a Whig in politics but a Tory in religion. Even these identities were unstable. A pamphlet Swift wrote in 1701 was mistaken for the work of Gilbert Burnet, a hardline Whig ...”

“... We also hear from his mother, Jane Gordon, a famous feminist psychologist; from his father, Jonathan Gordon, an analyst who specialises in lost boys; and from Darren Eberheart, one of those lost boys himself. They all speak in the first person. In fact, it’s only at the very end of the novel that Adam narrates his story in his own voice, that we hear ...”

“... his career: a desire to control the political centre, an emphasis on upholding Britain’s global power, and a haughty insistence on his right to pursue his own approaches to these tasks. Like his ancestors, Grey wasn’t an intellectual; he was at Balliol when T.H. Green was a fellow there, but the great sage meant nothing to him. He spent so much time ...”

“... know that the Parthenon was a temple, we do not experience it as a numinous haunt of the gods. The power of its finished form is now perhaps beyond imagination: but it may be doubted whether even the vast chryselephantine statue of Athene which it housed – and which was, by all accounts, incomparable in its vulgarity – added any awfulness to the place. The ...”

“... but a trifling point of geography’. The dishonesty of map-makers, the credulity of men in power and the destitution of the land were robbing him of the pleasure, which he had felt so keenly on the Endeavour, of being the discoverer, ‘even was it nothing more than sands and Shoals’. Now something akin to despair set in, so that the temptation of ...”

“... many writers and artists today, from Australia to Brazil. It also sums up the central argument of Jonathan Brown’s new book The Golden Age of Painting in Spain, which emphasises Spain’s cultural dependence on foreigners. The author claims that even in its so-called ‘Golden Age’, here defined as the period 1480-1700, Spain remained ‘on the periphery ...”

“... Vitto-rio Codovilla, whose dogmatism ill-prepared the adolescent party for the realities of power. As Carr so ably demonstrates, the PCE subsequently shot to power almost entirely as a result of propulsion totally beyond its own control, and, even in its position of preeminence, continued under Comintern tutelage with ...”