"Do you remember all their names? How did you all get around? Your parents mustn’t have had many hobbies, and always, eventually, Jesus, what were Christmases like in your house?"

"Last year, Entertainment Weekly listed 172 new Christmas movies across all platforms. Extrapolating this backwards in time, it’s likely that around 700 Christmas movies have been produced and released since December 2020."

'If [Elon] Musk is the stupid person’s idea of a smart person, [Conor] McGregor might be said to be a 12-year-old’s idea of a cool 14-year-old'

"There are photos of nights out which predate the smartphone era by several years, conjuring a dimly remembered, and alarming, recollection that we all used to take photos on digital cameras, plug them into our laptops, and upload them one by one in the manner of dribbling psychopaths."

"I find it silly, even offensive, for him to say historians are useless, but I also find it extremely funny, and of a piece with a man whose motivation is to make a thrilling piece of drama, not a document of historical fact."

"Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the figure of Rishi Sunak, a vaguely plausible hologram of a politician, an AI who’s been fed too few commands to pass the Turing Test."

"On November 7, 2020, while America awaited the results of the presidential election, Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani held a press conference to discuss electoral fraud - this event was held, not at the Four Seasons hotel in downtown Philadelphia, but in the carpark of a garden centre named Four Seasons Total Landscaping."

"At every stage of the conflict, we’ve read bowdlerised accounts of Israel’s assault on Gaza, some of which only make sense if one considers all Palestinians responsible for the horrors done by Hamas, and Israel’s actions, and intentions, infallibly noble."

"Is that an impossibly young Jude Law in an old Sherlock serial? Is that Tamzin Outhwaite off Eastenders in a cop show that involves time travel for some reason? And for the love of God, which one is Dalziel and which one’s Pascoe?"

"My mother died when I was five, so the grief of it is not something I process every day, at least not consciously."