“... a slight resentment towards translations, and in his clever ‘Poem Waiting to be Translated’, Peter Porter asks: Why not remember the heroes of hard situations, those who answered inquisitors in fresh parables, whose lyrical rejoinders are assembled here in memorial Penguins? Porter is glancing at the work of Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Rozewicz, and ...”

“... verses, and he/she wants to understand, face this grave on Beeston Hill, your back to Leeds, and read the chiselled epitaph I’ve planned: Beneath your feet’s a poet, then a pit.Poetry supporter, if you’re here to findhow poems can grow from (beat you to it!) SHIT find the beef, the beer, the bread, then look ...”

“... Council. Anyone being groomed for the India Service and, indeed, for the Colonial Service had to read his works. From Lyall in India to Swettenham in Malaya, Shepstone in Natal, Cromer in Egypt, Lugard in Nigeria and Uganda, Harold MacMichael in Sudan and Donald Cameron in Tanganyika, colonial administrators throughout the empire absorbed his arguments ...”

“... species in the world and now critically endangered in the north-east Atlantic.) Personally, I’ll read pretty much any old rubbish about sharks and absolutely anything about shark attacks. We shark enthusiasts are usually caught between news reports, stupid websites (‘Aquarium Worker Bitten on Face by Shark!’) and the scientific stuff, which can be dry. I ...”

“... italicised ‘No.’ Yet much as the professional amateurism of travel writing requires him to read up on his destinations without appearing too knowing about them, he keeps a wary eye on the assumptions and prejudices he represents himself as having. When a schoolgirl in Nanjing expresses pity for some chicks preserved in formaldehyde, he realises that ...”

“... I assumed most of his fighting had taken place on the other side of the Atlantic. But now I read that the Bonhomme Richard had been involved in a sea battle off Flamborough Head in Yorkshire and that it still lay somewhere near the white chalk cliffs. In recent decades, both the US and French navies have tried to locate it, but there are hundreds of ...”

“... the last laugh!’ Hence, too, the propagandist National Consultation in which the first question read: ‘George Soros wants to persuade Brussels to settle at least a million people from Africa and the Middle East in European Union territory, including Hungary. Do you support this part of the Soros plan?’ Orbán’s campaign against a Jewish billionaire ...”

“... the support of the queen,’ Lownie writes, ‘and the endorsement of the former trade secretary Peter Mandelson.’ Andrew was a walking category error, perceiving no difference between business and pleasure, between what was good for the country and what was excellent for him, conducting a campaign of international larceny masquerading as public ...”

“... story the next day on my portable Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter for the Guardian, whose reporter Peter Niesewand had already filed the main piece. I forget now what I had to add, but I took my pages to the Reuters bureau, a fifteen-minute walk away, for its telex operators to transmit to London. It was while I was returning to the Commodore that the regular ...”

“... create, to succeed and to greatness. Now a king, now a jester, part Puck, part Palladio, sometimes Peter Pan, sometimes Napoleon, the public and private Lutyens were uneasily juxtaposed: the architect who could synthesise discrepant styles and harmonise spatial dissonances with such unfailing assurance and panache never really got his act together as an ...”

“... As English remarks, the Hooker family, and the conflicts provoked by Helen’s headstrong ways, read like the plot of a Marquand novel. It did not have a happy ending, but the beginning was romantic: a runaway marriage in 1935, a house in O’Malley’s beloved Mayo, involvement in Dublin’s theatrical and literary scene, while the publication of On ...”

“... meeting-house, Ballymoney First Presbyterian Church. We’re filming a history teacher read from Lorimer’s New Testament in Scots, the passage where Peter denies Christ and a servant quean says: ‘yer Galille twang outs ye.’ The interior of the church seems very military. I count 11 crowns among the ...”

“... ones, and especially if they agree independently, one must begin by believing them. For instance, Peter Sawyer’s calculation of manpower by number of horses transportable founders on the fact that a minimum number of men are needed even to crew a horse-transporter. As for the nature of Viking armies, Smyth comments drily that too many scholars seem to have ...”

“... and satisfying menu; but the reader who misses the great names of the period should be warned that Peter Eisenman, Richard Rogers, Alvaro Siza, Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas (along with the central figure in Barcelona’s historic renewal, Oriol Bohigas) are all represented by substantial essays or interviews. I am not sure whether the distribution of these ...”

“... Quite a few blue-chip Stalinists are here gently described as ‘left-wing’. It’s odd to read one of them being described as ‘a fiery freedom fighter’ – actually a blustering, hard-drinking tankie who owed me a lot of money. Similarly, the Fifties newspapers, the Guardian and New Age, are described as ‘left-wing’ papers, which would have ...”