“... But a voice that scorns chorales is yelling ‘Wanker!’ Tony Harrison, ‘V’ 1. There’s oil and backwash from these boats departing Hamburg’s morning wharves. There’s stalking cranes. Men pull and tote. One street back the sleepy whores lean out from clubs. They clutch their towels. They call for milk and fresh-bagged rolls, their wigs in sun like lacquered cowls as Hamburg’s one-note church bells toll ...”

“... pizzazz to the urban get-around. (One of these even bruits its modernity with a horizontal white lightning flash.) But Moulton’s real innovations were hiding under the bike’s Eagle-era sci-fi skirts: when it went into production in 1962, the bike had a low frame, small wheels and front and rear suspension. Moulton’s was not the first attempt at a ...”

“... his recent Leonard Stein lectures, in which he went on to describe his subsequent disillusionment. Tony Judt is now an incisive critic of Israeli policy but as a youthful Zionist he flew out to help the Jewish state during the war, and remembers – this by way of contrast with his students 40 years later at New York University – that opinion at Cambridge ...”

“... its wet, warm arms, showering her with thousands of greedy, rough kisses, blinding her with the white zigzag explosions of uncountable lightning bolts, deafening her with ear-splitting rolls of thunder ... Then already hopelessly soaked, she stood up straight, offering her body to the powerful surge of water. For an instant the thought crossed her mind to ...”

“... Australia. Some Great Thing resounds with the sound of working men: Jerry McGuinty, Edgar Davies, Tony Espolito, Johnny Cooper, Mario Calzone are ‘the usual muddy mix’, men who can stand ‘for 19 hours in the rain’, building houses and talking to each other the way men do – ‘I can’t cunt find fuckin nails ass, shit, you seen them, hoor?’ Not ...”

“... him sleep in their apartment when her parents are in town. Bix is Black; Lizzie’s parents are white and Texan (her parents ‘would just know’). In The Candy House, Bix and Lizzie are married with four children. But he’s nostalgic for his graduate student days and the pot-fuelled conversations he used to overhear between Lizzie and her friends: ‘How ...”

“... in June, John Patten praised it, the Home Secretary says Selbourne has proved conclusively that Tony Blair cannot turn the Labour Party into a ‘civic’ party, and so, more or less endlessly, on. What has got into editors, politicians and the public? A variety of things, of which three are obvious. One is that the Conservative Party is feeling the lack of ...”

“... and an African American ambassador to the UN (Susan Rice, now the national security adviser). White Americans are always being reminded – rightly – that they constitute a shrinking group and that the future belongs to the African American, Latino and Asian minorities. Perhaps this was the sunset vote. The failure of the American Dream, as we are told ...”

“... over two hundred pages, with more than a hundred colour plates, as well as a series of black and white portrait photographs of the artists taken by Johnnie Shand Kydd. It has five catalogue essays, several pages of artists’ biographies, a bibliography and, as the very last item in the book, a six-page checklist of the 110 works in the exhibition, with an ...”

“... evidence against them by no fewer than three intending diarists. There they sat, Dick, Barbara and Tony, scribbling away while the nation’s fate was being decided. No wonder there was resentment among the less literary members of the Cabinet. They didn’t think it was fair. It is also a misfortune that all three of those diarists were broadly speaking on ...”

“... for the occasional progress by limousine across the bridge. The mansion he lived in, nicknamed the White House, stood on top of the highest hill in the vicinity of Manhattan. He was the Godfather of the Gambino Family of the Cosa Nostra, having succeeded to the throne as a cousin, married to the sister-in-law, of Carlo Gambino, who had in his day been ...”

“... fellow lodger in a gloomy house in St John’s Wood. She was old, shrivelled, big-nosed and very white, and she lay, propped up by pillows, under a frayed coverlet on a brass bed.    ‘So you are the little boy at the top of the castle. I hear your footsteps on the stairs. Why do you always run? A young gentleman should walk, not run.’    I was ...”

“... met his family there, while my eight-year-old daughter was marvelling at his masterpiece, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. It seems strange that an artist such as Jeff Koons can include a gigantic puppy dog in his repertoire, to massive acclaim, while Sandaldjian’s minute Disney figures are admired only by a tiny group of cognoscenti. After all, as ...”

“... and the TV cameras, and behave like a family inside a house, unaware they’re being watched. Tony Greig and a minor English ex-bowler were sitting in the commentator’s box and discussing plans and strategies, while the little microphone in one of the stumps, placed there to detect the sound of a nick, eavesdropped on two players conversing: ‘Lagta ...”

“... of his friends up to my mother. The man stood at the end of her bed with his trousers undone. ‘Tony said it would be OK,’ he said. These drunken friends sometimes visited our house on their days off work, but when my father went to the front door – groggy, doing up his dressing-gown – he didn’t recognise them and sent them away. Fights broke out on ...”