“... and a date: 1633. This was the year a local gentleman, Sir John Reresby of Thrybergh Hall, began to note the contents of his garden. Every peach, pear and plum is catalogued, as are herbs, shrubs, bulbs – ‘Kentish Codlings’, ‘the Granado Gilliflower’, ‘Melincholly Munkes hoode’ – and attempts at grafting ...”

“... were also a frequent trigger. In the 1860s the High Church principles of Thomas Keble (brother of John Keble, a leading figure in the Tractarian movement) became unpopular in his Gloucestershire parish, producing resentment that might have exacerbated opposition to the enclosure of local common land. In 1864, a disturbing letter arrived for ...”

“... the word was with God; at the end, a passage in Revelation describes an angel appearing to St John holding an open book and instructing him to eat it: ‘it will make your stomach bitter, but it will be as sweet as honey in your mouth.’ In the 12th-century Glossa Ordinaria, the standard set of medieval biblical commentaries, some passages of the Bible ...”

“... kind about my sister … But he began to shake my arms and legs, while making a hissing noise.’ John Holms, the writer Peggy starts sleeping with in the dying days of her marriage, protects her from her husband, but only through more of the same. ‘“I’ll kill him,” he said blithely, turning on his side and tapping my nose.’The novel’s ...”

“... kind of right, so’s we can be all-those-years-ago hardfaced again. My mother’s brother, Uncle John, twenty years outbreathing her – his Seventy-Five throws shadows now that I’m her age. Much of my life his Man’s-World excluded me: the pubs, the bevvying, docks, grabs, slings, his docker’s hook slashing into cotton bales ... that khaki ...”

“... the warrant ironclad.Hence our golden rule: All men must have a voice. But not a pen.Welli.m. John Burnside. . . Her hair the colour of wells. Half a line the black-haired girl told me you didn’t use,so I kept it for myself. Its day would come.Thirty years. O the rewards of patience. Last night I started with that line of Sorleyswhen the radio ...”

“... about middle-aged women suffering. They were Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955), John McGahern’s The Barracks (1961) and Aidan Higgins’s Langrishe, Go Down (1966). It is no coincidence, either, that the best novels about men in the period after independence dealt with figures in extreme and exquisite isolation, as in the novels of Beckett ...”

“... That she was toeing the Party line didn’t occur to me, though it did to my companion, John Scaife, another budding conscript, who was much more scathing on the subject and cynical about the tears. 2 February. Ten days or so ago I did an interview for the Today programme in connection with the revival of The History Boys now playing at ...”

“... department is normally the section that spies on the other side’s intelligence department. John le Carré writes novels about this kind of espionage: we know that whether or not Smiley defeats Karla, it will make no difference to the price of eggs. The alternative is to link the spies with some event or threat of world-shaking importance, like the ...”

“... about what has been coming out, and about whether some beloved work has stood the test of time’. John Morrill has identified a hungry constituency to whom his book will be a godsend. The width and depth of Morrill’s reading are awesome. How else can one appropriately respond to the book than by resolving guiltily to get up earlier and work harder? Morrill ...”

“... The Story of the ‘Big Issue’ (Earthscan, £12). Swithinbank begins her story in 1967 when John Bird (Anglo-Irish working-class family from Paddington slums; spent his formative years in detention centres, art schools and the Socialist Labour League) first met Gordon Roddick (public-school educated ex-wandering poet; later husband of Anita, founder of ...”

“... distended immodesty. His fellow donors include the late Bee Gee Robin Gibb, the mobile phone baron John Caudwell and the pornographer Richard Desmond: their name liveth for evermore all right, prominently, in a niche on the western side of the structure. The memorial to the 55,573 nameless dead airmen of Bomber Command and its few thousand survivors has ...”

“... John Lloyd, currently the editor of the Financial Times Magazine, resigned as associate editor of the New Statesman in April 2003. His reasons for leaving were published in a ‘farewell article’, in which he criticised ‘a large part of the British Left’ for its opposition to the war in Iraq, described the Statesman as ‘a sort of upmarket version of the Daily Mirror’, and concluded that because ‘the NS believes that Blair and the US are the problem, not the solution,’ it was ‘time to recognise that Blairites like me should not appear regularly in its pages ...”

“... equipped.                   I may be needing a new cover, signals Cupcake, John Hollander’s secret agent in his marvellous book-length poem Reflections on Espionage:                                      I worry Mostly, though, how having been made another Person might have enabled me to do the ...”

“... that at every turn the narrative seems to play itself out before our eyes, the first volume of John Richardson’s long-awaited Life of Picasso will leave its readers waiting impatiently for Volume Two. Long may it go on. Meanwhile it is a special kind of pleasure to be able to praise the book of an old and close friend, and be confident that the praise ...”