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“... place, too: so lavishly heathered, gorsed, pined, silver-birched and golf-coursed it might be North Britain. Yet despite this bonfire of the unities it is distinct, a monument to douce fakery, indeed the monument. It’s at its best when it is all dressed up, most real when it’s at its most sham self. The architect and pamphleteer Thomas ...”

“... of novels follows the career of a Scotswoman, Chris Guthrie, from childhood on a croft in the North-Eastern coastlands, through the disruption of the First World War and two marriages, to middle age in a soulless city, ‘Dundon’, which combines repugnant features of Aberdeen and Dundee. The first segment, Sunset Song, is regarded in Scotland as a ...”

“... a framed still from a favourite film, A Hard Day’s Night; an essay by Eula Biss referring to Paul McCartney and ‘Norwegian Wood’; McCartney sporting a man bun during his lockdown vacation; rave reviews for McCartney’s new lockdown solo album; various reflections on the fiftieth anniversary of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass; various ...”

“... of Conflict, he fulminated against the Irish Republic’s attempt to exert a moral sway over the North while implicitly excluding from its constitutional definition of ‘Irish’ ‘the Northern Ulster Scots Protestant tradition’. The state, therefore, in Dr Fitzgerald’s view, ‘evolved in a lopsided manner that has notably failed to reflect the whole ...”

“... turtles.’ The turtles kettled the marchers to the east. I heard a libertarian carrying a Ron Paul sign discuss capitalism with a socialist. Could a pizza oven be owned by everyone who cooked and served the pizzas? Then it started to rain. One group of stalwarts danced up Tampa Street. The turtles marched away, singing ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’. Somebody ...”

“... on their lives before autumn 1888. Crippen may be the name forever associated with the ‘North London cellar murder’, but here he is treated by Rubenhold as one character in ‘an ensemble cast brought together to tell a more panoramic and human version of one of the most infamous crimes of the early 20th century’. Chiefly, she tells the life ...”

“... redecorator, a believer in déjà-vu, reincarnation and sleeping with one’s head to the magnetic North, mightily addicted to reading her works to captive audiences (she once fobbed off an army requisitioning officer by this means) – so it could go on. Her positive qualities are usually listed as courage, zest for life and versatility as an author; the pen ...”

“... Paul Feyerabend, the philosopher of science and famous iconoclast about the sciences, wrote in Killing Time, his autobiography published post-humously in 1996, that ‘in an incautious moment’ he had promised his young wife that he would produce ‘one more collage, a book no less, on the topic of reality’. He stopped work in November 1993 when he became ill, and died soon afterwards, at the age of seventy ...”

“... Paul Muldoon excluded himself from Contemporary Irish Poetry, his 1986 Faber anthology, but he included a poem by Seamus Heaney that was dedicated to him. We don’t of course know why the poem was dedicated to him, or indeed whether it is in any sense about him. It is a suggestive poem about what the living can get from the dead: Widgeon For Paul Muldoon It had been badly shot ...”

“... under discussion. Smiricky, as narrator, assures us that there really are Czech secret agents in North America. When visitors from Czechoslovakia arrive, smuggling illicit literature, they may be Communist agents provocateurs or they may be naive, anti-Jewish Fascists. Smiricky finds some of them rather funny, but he takes one of the agents quite ...”

“... he cut trees and fought fires in the back-country and, minister’s son or not, with his brother Paul he fought with his fists in the streets and barrooms of Missoula. In his late teens, he went east to Dartmouth College, earned a degree, and taught for a few years after graduation. Then he briefly returned to Montana and the Forest Service before marrying ...”

“... Police) officer from Banja Luka hangs out with Bosnian Muslims. They all followed Jacques Paul Klein from the Balkans, where he ran UN missions; in Monrovia, he was the special representative of the secretary-general until last month, and arguably the most powerful man in the country. With four times the budget of the transitional government, Klein ...”

“... new religion, which emerged in the Greek language through the gospel narratives and the letters of Paul. Christians had access to the Jewish Bible through the Greek translation known as the Septuagint – so called because it was said to have had 70 translators. A Christian who was also an eloquent Latin rhetorician, as Tertullian was, would have felt obliged ...”

“... when Donald Trump flew in to complain about a plan to put offshore wind turbines in the North Sea close to his luxury golf resort at Balmedie, near Aberdeen. I asked the Parliament’s press office if Sick Boy and Renton used the same room, maybe it’s the best one, they keep it nice for special visitors. ‘The scene was filmed in a committee room ...”

“... highly-paid press officers, are prepared to divulge information. When Friends of the Earth asked North-West Water how much poisonous lead they had measured in their water, the quango haughtily refused to reply, complaining that they did not know where the questions were leading. I cite one example from a whole host of sealed lips I have encountered among ...”