Britain in the first half of the nineties: Barnes takes us from Thatcher to Blair in essays written for the New Yorker. Whilst political journalism obviously isn't quite his métier, he shows us - as he always does - what an elegant, witty writer can do with material that has been done to destruction already by others. Just occasionally we get a touch of his schoolboyish side, where he can't resist pointing out gleefully how clever he's been: the notoriously comic index, of course, but also the way he highlights things like his alertness in spotting the Pugin hinges in the Shadow Cabinet room, for instance, but fails to give us any information about what he actually asked Tony Blair in their interview there. ( )

perfectly recreates these times ( )