“... and ‘wakers-up’ like Holub and Herbert, deconstructive poets of soccer-violence Britain like Peter Reading. Opposed to them are a number of predictable villains (Larkin, Hill, Hughes), none of whom, however, is entirely dismissed or crudely lambasted. Hughes’s Moortown Diary is his best work, Paulin argues, but its ...”

“... law and medicine. Prominent Lebanese Americans like Ralph Nader, Michael DeBakey, William Peter Blatty, Senator James Abourezk and General John Abizaid rarely visited Lebanon itself. As attached as some were to their grandmothers’ cooking and to bits of folklore, they preferred to keep the country at a distance. Anthony Shadid was an exception. As ...”

“... one of the three officers put on trial, to interview them, but despite their admissions to DCI Peter Imbert and the existence of a forensic statement which intimately linked the Guildford bombings to the Caterham bombing, DCI Style failed to ask them a single question about the Guildford bombings. No one was to tell the jury at his trial about this signal ...”

“... of sixteen who had been engaged to be married to a neighbour, a man of sixty, before she married Peter – lighted the lamp and spread a light meal on the table – bread and milk. The meal over, Peter took his accordion from the shelf and sitting right opposite the window to the east played ‘Home, Sweet Home’. He ...”

“... is at present something of a fashion for novels reflecting other novels, ironically and obliquely (Peter Ackroyd’s The Great Fire of London comes to mind, with Little Dorrit behind it; or even Flaubert’s Parrot, though biography, fiction and all inform that eccentric piece of writing). These, at best, are neither extensions nor offshoots, but playful and ...”

“... Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography is as much a history of characterisations of the city as a history of London itself. And although Ackroyd is most concerned with character in the sense of ‘a personality invested with distinctive attributes and qualities, by a novelist or dramatist’, readers of his previous writings will not be surprised to hear that many other meanings of the word also come into play – ‘distinctive features’, ‘essential peculiarity’, ‘nature, style’, certainly; but also ‘distinctive mark, evidence, or token’; ‘a cipher for secret correspondence’; and even ‘a cabbalistic or magical sign or emblem ...”

“... the ruling party had already chosen its candidates. I almost felt sorry for the smiling face of Peter Odili. British audiences may remember him as the governor of Rivers State in the Niger Delta, Nigeria’s richest state: last year he entertained a Channel 4 film crew in his throne room with Cristal champagne, which costs more per bottle than the large ...”

“... the Public Security Bureau headquarters. The 18th-century medical school that used to sit on Iron Hill, near the Potala, was reduced to rubble by Chinese mortar fire during the 1959 uprising; most of the buildings of the great monasteries have been demolished; and the Tibetan character of the city has almost disappeared as it has been surrounded and overlaid ...”

“... above the tannin scum: leathery seaweed, wads of yellow paper. They tiptoe out, speeded-up Benny Hill, over sharp stones, to neat piles of folded clothes. The watched, towelled down and returned to their balconies, rusting rails and anti-gull devices, become the watchers. A slow-motion cinema of such tender boredom that they will never move again. Along the ...”

“... the country to take possession. He finds a pastoral idyll of a house above a river, sheltered by a hill from the winds, looking out over meadows and golden fields. Inside is a tiled stove, pictures of the tsar, damask wallpaper, all rather dilapidated. Onegin roots through the cupboards. He finds nothing but an accounts book, some home-made fruit ...”

“... But the next general election is not going to be like Crosby, though it may well be quite like Hill-head. The Liberals will, come what may, constitute the bulk of an Alliance Parliamentary group under any likely outcome. The negotiations have protected their interests in all the ‘golden seats’ where they are poised for victory. It can hardly be claimed ...”

“... and Reformation 1453-1660 by Mary Hollings, which we used in our history classes under H.H. Hill. I imagine most of us remembered this quote and trotted it out in School Certificate a year or so later, and my only thought now is how wearisome it must have been for the examiner reading it again and again. I suppose the Landsknecht’s equivalent gesture ...”

“... this sort of browned-off tone does for a good deal of the verse in Bell’s Complete Poems. Peter Porter writes that Bell ‘knew more about poetry than any other writer I have known’, yet the number of Bell’s best poems is small. Clearly he was multi-talented. A stanza from a version of Corbiere shows fine use of form and acoustics. Bell can also ...”

“... wheel of a splendid motor (‘a shimmering AC’, according to Joseph Connolly), looking like Lord Peter Wimsey. Connolly also records that Wodehouse crashed this car, in the Ukridge manner, and never drove again. But let that pass. Herbert Warren Wind is a serious man. Here is his most serious sentence – and I am not smiling now. ‘During the Second World ...”

“... instead of casting a shadow over us, will exist only in the shadow cast by our search for origins. Peter Brooker and Peter Widdowson’s thorough survey of fictions of Englishness casts a shadow of this kind. It rests on a theory of the relation between literature and ideology developed in the 1970s: the function of ideology ...”