“... to rehouse all these homeless people. So there was work in our town. The oldest men, men with white beards, men you would have called on at most to fix your stove in winter, now clambered up and down scaffolding poles. They were like bearded weasels. I too found work. I had a notebook, and wrote down metres and centimetres and kept a tally of ...”

“... leave their small Caribbean island for Britain in the 1950s, when prospects were cheery. The white folks of the West had never had it so good: too good, or so their masters told them, to settle at menial labours. Since the publication of her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones, in 1959, Paule Marshall has been weaving a delicate history of the ...”

“... least about moderation – is at an end. The polls, which a scant month or so ago were giving the White House to Ross Perot, are now awarding it to ‘The New Covenant’ (a slogan so treacly in its unction that it died a-borning and is never, ever mentioned even for satirical purposes. Its companion exhortation, ‘Putting People First’, is so vacuous that ...”

“... Of all the many tributes to Michael Foot it was David Cameron who hit the nail on the head. He was, Cameron said, ‘almost the last link to a more heroic age in politics’. In appearance, and demeanour, Foot resembled an Old Testament prophet. An impression which, in later life, his shock of white hair, the passion of his delivery and the magnificence of his rhetoric served only to enhance ...”

“... vast crowds of hideous people thronging the streets and bus queues.’ There’s an old-fashioned, white-gloved, Bowes-Lyon kind of superiority to all this, and reading Gielgud’s letters makes you realise how theatrical the business of class often is in this country. It is of course perfectly English to hate people at bus stops, but also English to ...”

“... the weather been hazier, more care might have been taken and the collision avoided. In that case, Michael Davie suggests, it’s likely that no one would ever have known how close to disaster they’d been: ‘not all near-misses by aircraft are reported now; and the Ice Patrol wonder how many near-collisions by ships were reported then.’ At the inquiries ...”

“... jogging, praising, claiming – even if he only has someone saying: ‘I am drinking a dry white wine’ – is finally cringing, odious and unbelievable. ‘My life, on the other hand, has been a series of border violations’; ‘Women are drawn to his heat; dogs rub against his legs’; ‘In her company, his manhood still soars, like Gothic ...”

“... He’s an Irish-American pol of an earlier vintage and relatively harmless. He goes down well with white blue-collar voters and African-Americans. But Iowa and New Hampshire have wounded him badly and I wonder if he can now win in South Carolina, where he was heavily favoured. I like Amy Klobuchar, the senator from Minnesota, best of all. She clearly won the ...”

“... in the daytime. The snuffling or crisping animal noises at night. The thunderstorms and the warm, white rains. Everything tending to the excessive, the immoderate, the monstrous. Here, the parcelled tree breeds for the backhoe and the greige ‘mature community’, knocked up overnight from cardboard and nail guns and spray paint. Sometimes, dry, glacial air ...”

“... towers of a city in the distance; then a set of ramshackle houses; a pasture and a farmhouse; the white screen of a drive-in; a field full of oil pumps. A drawling voice, all wide vowels and unclosed consonants, starts to philosophise: ‘The world is full of complainers, and the fact is, nothing comes with a guarantee ... Something can always go wrong ...”

“... gets on, manifestly exhausted, carrying a sleeping child. Paley, sitting in the last row of the white section, tries in vain to persuade the woman to take her seat. The woman is far too frightened of the consequences to do that, but finally agrees to place the child in Paley’s lap. A white man says to her: ‘Lady, I ...”

“... to be able to hear any voices but their own. One of those they should have been hearing was Michael Young’s. Young is the country’s most compelling sociologist. Not lower-middle-class in origin, not indeed English at all, but half-Irish and half-Australian, educated outside the normal rut at Dartington, and then, after a spell at Gray’s Inn, by ...”

“... haven’t done poet or translator any favours with their cover (a creepy-looking black and white caricature of Tranströmer with curly-wurly writing that appears to promise a graphic novel within, and the words ‘Bright Scythe’ like a blue parrot along one shoulder), the odd title (a celebration of death?) or the book itself as an object: it’s ...”

“... of them barricade themselves with their luggage. One ends up shrugging at the rather black and white notations: the ‘air-raid sandwiches packed for him by his friend the chaplain, a whole package of sandwiches with plenty of sausage in them, and the terrible thing was that they tasted so good’, ‘the schnapps was excellent,’ ‘they were still ...”

“... last minute. Another traitor is executed, and the film ends with detailed verbal information, in white letters on a black screen, about the deaths of all the remaining four chief characters we have met, not too long after the events of the film. Three others have died in the course of the story. But as you can probably tell even from this quick and nasty ...”