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“... stanza of Mangan’s: O, my Dark Rosaleen, Do not sigh, do not weep! The priests are on the ocean green, They march along the Deep. There’s wine from the royal Pope, Upon the ocean green; And Spanish ale shall give you hope, My Dark Rosaleen! My own Rosaleen! Shall glad your heart, shall give you hope, Shall give you ...”

“... Mrs Wrayburn, like Fred’s sisters and mother, who stitch banners in the purple white and green of the WSPU, will gain less from the changes to come than Daisy, who has nothing to lose and is already quite tough. When Kelly, the journalist who has cost her her job, meets her as she sets out for Cambridge, she lets him propostion her. ‘He put his arm ...”

“... Lansbury Drive, Hayes, where she grew up. From pavement level, she could sense the weird electric green of a neighbour’s ivy, the bitumen skies and the pervasive tang of pollution from the M25, under construction throughout her childhood. In 2014, she lay down again, naked and surrounded by a cordon of fellow protesters, on the service road in Delhi where ...”

“... her minders and escaping in a carriage after a tryst at London Zoo, exchanging vows at Gretna Green, and consummating the marriage at an inn near Keswick. To reassert control over the family fortune, her mother initiated a commission in lunacy to nullify the marriage on the grounds of Rosa’s ‘unsoundness of mind’. The public were aghast when she ...”

“... fifty or sixty thousand. The 17th and 18th-century poor, in the days when Britain constituted what Peter Linebaugh has called a thanatocracy, are uncommemorated, as are the apprentices, the economic migrants and the vagrants who were hanged for trifling crimes against property. Even the infamous victims remain unnamed. There is no mention of Jack Sheppard, the ...”

“... to the discovery that the list of the BWMA’s honorary members – there’s Jilly Cooper, Peter Hitchens, Norris McWhirter, mad Patrick Moore – includes the name of the universally adored J.K. Rowling OBE. Is this not taking the antique Englishness of Harry Potter just a little too far? But then I remember that the ‘feasts’ served up at Hogwarts ...”

“... We were all friends, I suppose. You may not remember Graham, but he was Maureen’s first husband, Peter and Jill’s father . . . you do, that’s good. They were Surrey people: they had a grand house in Caterham. Graham was a rich fellow, talented, energetic, generous; he’d made most of his money as a printer: he published the daily stock exchange ...”

“... There was little to suggest, twenty-odd years ago, that Superintendent Andrew Dalziel and Sergeant Peter Pascoe would develop as they have, except Reginald Hill’s unusual and wise decision never to write consecutive novels about them.* Their debut in A Clubbable Woman (1970) came eight years after Julian Symons had first pronounced the ‘detective story’ dead; as late as 1989 T ...”

“... 13 January. One of Peter Cook’s jokes, several times quoted in his obituaries, is of two men chatting. ‘I’m writing a novel,’ says one, whereupon the other says: ‘Yes, neither am I.’ And of course it’s funny and has a point, except that Peter, I suspect, felt that this disposed of the matter entirely ...”

“... in the wilderness. Time alters the past. Gods, too, change ... The exclamatory staccato style is Peter Vansittart’s, and so are some of the words. Many sentences get no further than half a dozen words, some are mere singletons. The manner is intentional, but no more digestible for that. Its chief purpose would seem to be the conveyance of chunks of ...”

“... in and half out of Sammy’s hole. To reach Sammy you went down steps, and pushed open a battered green door that snagged and bumped along the ground. Behind it he stoked the boiler that kept us heated. The boiler was at the back behind twenty feet piled high with trash, smashed picture frames and three-legged chairs, scarred desks stacked with their feet in ...”

“... us. I suspect that, among the stories that Kafka or his Dog had in mind, were those of Johann Peter Hebel (1760-1826). At all events, Kafka called Hebel’s ‘Unexpected Reunion’ the ‘most wonderful story in the world’, and the judgment does not strike one as absurd. Hebel’s stories, or parables, first appeared in the Lutheran almanac for the ...”

“... Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda is a tall story, as elaborate and fantastical as any of the yarns spun by the trickster hero of his last novel Illywhacker. For one thing, it’s a family history, and we’re all of us secretly stunned by the coincidences which have resulted, against the odds, in our existence. And the narrator’s account of his great-grandfather, the Reverend Oscar Hopkins, is, by any standards, a weird one ...”

“... Any physical or psychiatric disorder can be exaggerated, faked or feigned,’ the psychologists Peter Halligan, Christopher Bass and David Oakley wrote in their introduction to a collection of essays from 2003 titled Malingering and Illness Deception. Medical professionals, researchers and even courts, they went on, were often reluctant ‘to entertain the label or to stigmatise individuals as malingerers ...”

“... was six but I thought I knew what she meant. I had these friends, the Routledge twins: Andrew and Peter. My own two Christian names, as it happened, but divided up like that I didn’t recognise them as mine. Andrew was quiet and cautious, Peter quick and reckless. They lived on a mucky farm nearby; you turned out of the ...”