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“... engine full of power, magically harnessed, subject to the faintest pressure from the ball of your foot. The power of ninety horses – think of that! Suppose you had had ninety horses out there in front of you, forty-five pairs in a long line, galloping round the side of a mountain, wouldn’t that make your pulses jump? And this magic ribbon of concrete laid ...”

“... In the first vehicle, Blackett saw a flash and sparks at 23.37 hrs, and told the driver to put his foot down and get out of there. Then he realised the second snatch wasn’t following them and went back to help. They radioed headquarters as their snatch rumbled back to the stricken vehicle. The regimental medical officer at Camp Abu Naji, Captain Vickers, was ...”

“... except his supercilious brazen bounciness. Hrabal’s style (or at least how it comes through Paul Wilson’s translation) is similarly freewheeling, exuberant, torrential, full of food and drink and wild scenes in cafés and athletic sexual encounters. Much of it strikes me as being more like what the Germans think of as uproariously funny than we ...”

“... of his usual cocked hat. ‘Oh, what a falling off was there!’ exclaimed the caricaturist Paul Pry, showing the Duke in his white trousers alighting on horse dung. But the diarist Creevey says the top-heavy hero was ‘immensely cheered’ by thousands. After all, lusty young troopers were sometimes unhorsed in this fashion. It was an age of military ...”

“... learned that incapacity is not the same thing as non-existence, although it often feels like it. Paul Carter would probably count himself among those who consider agoraphobia a proportionate response to the escalating dangers of modern life. In his view, the anxiety it articulates is collective and realistic. But he insists that any attempt to grasp its ...”

“... for this omnipresent phenomenon, one that produced decisive social and cultural change. Paul Frecker provides abundant proof of the ‘Cartomania’ that seized Britain in the 1860s, although, as he admits in a winning footnote, there is no evidence that this term was ever used by anybody Victorian.Cartes were the products of multi-lensed cameras ...”

“... can have enjoyed the astonishing good fortune not merely of an opposition party which chose first Foot and then Kinnock to do battle against her, but of the services of such invaluable allies as General Galtieri, Anthony Wedgwood Benn and ‘King Arthur’ Scargill? And was there anyone at Tory Central Office so absurdly optimistic as to foresee the hilarious ...”

“... feels a certain amount of foreboding, wondering ‘what sort of “beasts” required a seven-foot-high electric fence’. The Restraint of Beasts cheerfully exploits literary conventions lifted from Kafka, Beckett and Pinter. There is much terse dialogue loaded with menace: Donald subtly adjusts the heating and lighting in his office according to the ...”

“... Midsummer’s Day 1968 in northern Germany, and follows four main characters: Daniel Pagenstecher, Paul and Wilma Jocobi, and their daughter, Franziska. The narrative, which partly concerns the translation of Edgar Allan Poe, is overlaid with Pagenstecher’s wide-ranging exegesis. Wherever my reading eye touched down on the book’s curiously laid-out ...”

“... Gareth Parry reported in the Guardian of 19 January 1979. Bomb-carriers, from The Secret Agent to Paul Theroux’s Deptford-based urban terrorists in The Family Arsenal, have delighted in targeting Greenwich domes. There is something in the nature of the place, a residue of royalty and privilege and congenital self-satisfaction: the old dockside dowager has ...”

“... to conduct seminars to his groupies on the Dylan family’s garbage; fervent hagiographers like Paul Williams; politicians (Jimmy Carter was always quoting Dylan when on the stump), rock journalists, music historians, cultural historians, hard-core fanzine-types; and even an English international fast-bowler – Bob ‘Dylan’ Willis changed his name by ...”

“... recently pointed out, was anticipated by several stories and poems, including one about an 800-foot liner called the Titan. Enzensberger’s poem turns the tables on all of this by imagining at one point that ‘there was no such a thing [sic] as the sinking of the Titanic’ and that A Night to Remember is now showing in the ship’s cinema. The poem’s ...”

“... exist and the novel doesn’t, so you could say that the ontological shoe is on the other foot. The principles of the novel’s construction are expounded in two places, one near the beginning and the other towards the end, with a fair amount of contorted logic both times. ‘But who wrote the novel originally, if I’m simply the one who discovered ...”

“... in this context, it is worth looking for the source. He got it from the first letter from St Paul to Timothy as translated in the late fourth century by St Jerome, whose Latin Vulgate version survived to become the official Bible of the Catholic Church more than a thousand years later. The passage was often used to justify the bar on women priests. ‘I ...”

“... comparison with Nicolson. After Coats died in 1990, the diaries passed to Channon’s son, Paul, who died in 2007. Now, with the encouragement of his children, three formidable volumes have appeared, admirably edited by Simon Heffer, with profuse footnotes displaying considerable scholarship and intermittent pedantry.As Heffer says, Channon was seen as ...”