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“... When John le Carré published A Perfect Spy in 1986, Philip Roth, then spending a lot of time in London, called it ‘the best English novel since the war’. Not being such a fan of A Perfect Spy, I’ve occasionally wondered what Roth’s generous blurb says about the postwar English novel. As a le Carré bore, however, I’ve also wondered how Roth managed to overlook Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), the central novel in le Carré’s career, in which George Smiley – an outwardly diffident ex-spook with a strenuously unfaithful wife and an interest in 17th-century German literature – comes out of retirement to identify the turncoat in a secret service that’s explicitly presented as a metaphorical ‘vision of the British establishment at play ...”

“... one, in which the projection of sovereign power and ideology was the driver of overseas expansion? Philip Stern’s commanding history of British corporate imperialism suggests that the question is poorly framed. In an earlier book, he influentially presented the East India Company as a ‘company-state’, a hybrid uniquely successful in making government its ...”

“... anyway, collected in Slotkin’s book and in Warrior Dreams (1994) by James William Gibson. When Philip Caputo joined the Marines, he saw himself ‘charging up some distant beachhead, like John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima’. ‘War movies with John Wayne’ sent Ron Kovic to Vietnam: ‘Yes, I gave my dead dick for John Wayne,’ he said when he returned a ...”

“... the TV series, though the numbered ‘acts’ in the novel appear out of order (Two, One, Three). Philip Hensher described the book’s structure as ‘dazzling, Conrad-like’, and though it’s hardly Nostromo, and doesn’t pretend to be, it is a lot of fun and very well executed.The series as a whole plays a different kind of trick with time. The gaps ...”

“... chance that you would have met her in some club or at some party, or even on the pavement outside. Martin Amis remembers her showing up at the end of a dinner, on the arm of Nicholas Soames, and seating herself at the piano to sing ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ (to which, of course, the only answer was ‘no he ain’t’). Two members of the New Left Review ...”

“... claims he has filled ‘the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died’. Philip Roth has been led to histories of American racism by Coates’s books. David Brooks credits him for advancing an ‘education for white people’ that evidently began after ‘Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston and the other killings’. Even USA Today thinks ...”

“... ask any questions. She ate her supper and remarked at one point that the new pop star Ricky Martin looked like a fake. A director who was with us had been the subject of two of her pieces for ‘Talk of the Town’. He later told me he realised at the party that Lillian didn’t think of him as a friend. ‘In a perfectly nice way,’ he said, ‘I had ...”

“... about the death of another man, Colin Roach, in a police station; £48,699 to Stephen Dowsett and Philip Tape who were walking home from a dance a little drunk when they were bundled into a police van, taken to a police station and so terribly beaten that Dowsett’s jaw had to be re-set in two places; £17,500 to Manit Schemir, a mechanical engineer who was ...”

“... access to the information designed to encrypt it? The answer, pioneered by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman in the early 1970s, is to reject a principle of cryptography apparently so obvious as to go unchallenged until then: namely, that deciphering is the reverse of enciphering and that encryption and decryption keys are identical. Rejecting this ...”

“... to be alone in hinting, if cartoonishly, at its power; as the post-9/11 efforts of John Updike and Martin Amis show, it is easier to reduce ideological belief to pathologies of sexual frustration, or the ordeal of constipation. A self-dissolving post-ideological irony is the dominant mode of the few narratives about Americans engaged in the struggle against ...”

“... follower of the radical theologian Thomas Müntzer after witnessing a dispute between Müntzer and Martin Luther; Luther Blissett is very much not on his namesake’s side. The narrator’s story begins a few years later, in medias res, at Frankenhausen on 15 May 1525, when Philip of Hesse’s mercenaries crushed the ...”

“... forging an alliance with Sigismund in 1416 Henry played a central role in the election of Pope Martin V the following year. Vale also brings to light fascinating evidence of a diplomatic mission to central and eastern Europe in May 1421. Confident of victory in France now that his hereditary right to the throne had been recognised by the French king in the ...”

“... Germany and isolating it further. Most European states remained Catholic: to their rulers, notably Philip II of Spain, the English were anti-Christian and their queen a heretic. She spent the last 18 years of her reign fighting the Spanish, emptying the royal war chest and becoming increasingly dependent on the rich merchants who topped it up again. Driven by ...”

“... and become a book-market researcher pure and simple. Mann’s title sails uncomfortably close to Philip Gaskell’s From Writer to Reader (OUP, 1978). Gaskell’s book, subtitled ‘Studies in Editorial Method’, was as bibliographical as the other is sociological. What intervenes between writer and reader for Gaskell is not the undifferentiated ...”

“... by boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in ...”