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“... modern translators excel – and I must allow that they really do excel – in an opposite manner. Andrew Miller does Paul the Silentiary, Tony Harrison does Palladas and Humphrey Clucas does Catullus into a harsh but wholly English English which is true to the fiercely direct sexuality of the originals. We in the 20th century can do what Pope, with all his ...”

“... You don’t need, and could hardly have, a point or a plot. Then two things happen. Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber miss a very easy shot, a chance to do something interesting without trying, even within the confines of the genre; and Alan Parker caves into the idea of death. You think those long closing scenes are going to be about Eva Perón dying, but ...”

“... out’ from his fan base to achieve genuine bestsellerdom. The book owes a great deal to Andrew O’Hagan’s The Missing, a debt acknowledged by the dedication of Rankin’s next novella, Death Is Not the End, the following year. O’Hagan’s book told the story of a murderer known as Bible John whose deeds and, just as important, whose legend ...”

“... with plastic bowls of fruit at £1 a throw. The single gold coin is the dominant unit of exchange; brown tokens are trodden into tarmac like cigarette stubs or used gum. The blue wall carries a CORONET sign as a reminder of the building’s history. The ABC Cinema (as it was originally called) opened in 1932 as a 2000-seat Art Deco conversion of the former ...”

“... churning up dust. In vast, windowless sheds specialising in Logistics. In geometric stacks of red, brown and blue containers: HAMBURG SÜD, HANJIN, MOL. Like a monumental Paul Klee hammered out in steel. In Thatcher’s day it seemed a ground-level manifestation of what I took to be her vision of enterprise: deranged scams, small businesses wiped out. And the ...”

“... lowered. Wholly and proudly conventional writers and critics, such as Ruth Padel, Fiona Sampson, Andrew Motion and Peter McDonald, have found positive things to say. Last year Prynne received a Society of Authors award. The publication of the collected Poems in 1999, an ever fattening volume updated in 2005 and again last year, each time gathering in new ...”

“... subtle array, this … motile configuration’ of ‘grey in grey’. Gillian, to my memory, wore brown on brown, a thin brown polo-neck with a brownish waistcoat and some sort of brown and ordinary boots and skirt. Her hair was long and fair and ...”

“... judicious account of Nabokov’s life in the States, and, post-Lolita, in Montreux. Disposing of Andrew Field, his predecessor in the field, Brian Boyd cites his insolent, perfunctory response to one of Nabokov’s factual corrections. Told an event had taken place in July and not on ‘a wet autumnal day’, Field emended the phrase to ‘a wet autumnal day ...”

“... there was an increasing homogeneity of casting (the ‘anything with Tara Fitzgerald’ syndrome). Andrew Davies withdrew his adaptation of Angela Lambert’s A Rather English Marriage from the BBC when Alan Yentob insisted that an aristocratic ex-Battle of Britain pilot be played by David Jason; ITV loved it, but made similar demands. Eventually, back at the ...”

“... while Second Street itself saw better days some time ago. The Borden house – see ‘Andrew J. Borden’ in flowing script on the brass plate next to the door – stands by itself with a few scant feet of yard on either side. On the left is a stable, out of use since he sold the horse. In the back lot grow a few pear trees, laden at this ...”

“... days saving indigenous Canadians in the name of ‘the brotherhood of all men, white and red and brown’. The Island of Sheep (1936) proposes a similar brotherhood between the angry African tribesmen who save the day in the backstory and the angry Norwegian whale hunters who do the same in the main plot. Buchan’s idiosyncratic Toryism finds its fullest ...”

“... writing and caricatures of characters drawn from Amherst, like the overgrown Texan frat boy Andrew ‘Wang Dang’ Lang. It’s the funniest and most pleasurable of Wallace’s books of fiction. In a 1995 letter to DeLillo, with whom Jonathan Franzen had put him in touch because Wallace was concerned that a passage in Infinite Jest about tennis and ...”

“... A new history of the British Empire might be expected to concern itself with such issues as the construction of military dictatorship through the imposition of martial law; the violent seizure and settlement of land; the genocidal destruction of indigenous peoples (and their culture and environment); the establishment of what is now called ‘institutional racism’; and the continuing coercion and induced movement of labour ...”

“... but I am with you. After a routine summons to self-sacrifice – ‘whether we are black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots’ – he unleashed the maxim that will guide his policy: From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first. Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign ...”

“... David Mellor (greatly exaggerated, but not his only alleged misdemeanour), Hartley Booth, Michael Brown (though he is a borderline case, since he resigned from office while denying allegations that he had had a homosexual relationship). We should also not forget David Trevinnick and Graham Riddick, suspended from their jobs as Parliamentary Private ...”