“... the bar (Campbell, remember, is teetotal). His corpse was discovered washed up on a beach the next day. McAra lived in Balham; his mother was named as next of kin in his passport. In the chunkiest biography of Lang that the narrator consults, McAra has only five or six entries in the index: there’s ‘no reason in other words why anyone outside the party or ...”

“... in the 1970s for a rock band to call itself Supertramp in homage to his autobiography. But present-day readers seem to feel much as Auden did, when he took up Davies for a few weeks as a schoolboy, ‘without finding what I really wanted’. The copy of Later Days I looked at in the London Library (most of his works now being out of print) is full of ...”

“... to make of his impressions. The thrush’s message sounds good, he thinks: ‘No singer of the day or night/is lucky as I am.’ But can it be trusted? Is the thrush a properly mythological bird – a latter-day Philomel or Procne – or a relative of the kitsch robin at the end of ...”

“... and a homegirl, the flat-out joy of getting your hands on some free stuff. ‘This is the best day ever,’ Chelsea said, while looting the T-Mobile store. ‘Trainers, clothes, mobiles, iPods, Macs – possession of these things is tantamount to human rights,’ a writer called Charmaine Elliot posted on Blackfeminists.blog, remembering her own youth in ...”

“... a tribute to his labrador, Pindar: A Dog to Remember’; that Rosa’s husband, Robin, had already lost one wife to cancer; that a different man had once sent Rosa ‘an entire antique ruby parure after only one meeting’ and, years later, shot himself on Valentine’s Day; that the only person who could ...”

“... stench of sweat, urine and faeces their colleagues were enduring. By the time they all called it a day, a 26-year-old hotel receptionist called Baha Mousa had been disfigured by 93 visible injuries and asphyxiated. It didn’t end there. The first supposedly independent officer on the scene was explicitly told not to ask the other arrested men about their ...”

“... books; so he lent her Ivanhoe, took her to task when he disapproved of her hat, berated her when a day passed and she didn’t write him a loving letter. When he got ill, he fretted through every letter, complaining of her carelessness, her thoughtlessness, assuring her that ‘you need never doubt me, my little heart, if you treat me well.’ Baby-talk became ...”

“... imperial territories. Hilaire Belloc’s National League for Clean Government had a field day, as did others who hated Lloyd George’s demagoguery and radicalism. After Lloyd George became prime minister in 1916, many wealthy businessmen who had benefited financially from the expanded war state received honours: more than 1800 new knights were ...”

“... with her husband was simply too weak. Let her look into her heart, then dare say my judgment that day was in error. If this ferryman could be described as enigmatic he is an enigma of an entirely transparent sort; he could hardly announce his function in the book more clearly if he gave his name as Foreshadowing. From this point on, Beatrice becomes ...”

“... and all that. The chemist at the corner kept a twopenny library, and she used to go down every day for another book and say to him, ‘Haven’t you got anything hotter?’ ... He was quite surprised we didn’t have a kid in the first six months. But since she married me, she’s quite different – she never opens a book now. Another anecdote provides ...”

“... to stay in the United Kingdom ‘for the moment, see how it goes, maybe I’ll feel different one day …’ This sort of self-persuasion also released a horde of disgusted Scottish Lib Dems into the SNP park. Talking to some of them in Edinburgh and Glasgow, I saw that this was often their second migration. Once they had been refugees from Blairism and New ...”

“... over the past fifty years, and which is still pouring in, as you witnessed on the first day of the drama festival when all the ‘allies’ paraded, city by city, with their tributary silver and gold, enough, you cannot help thinking, ultimately to dissuade the Spartans from embarking on that Peloponnesian War they currently threaten so ...”

“... 26 January 1917; but there is a rightness about their transplantation to innumerable present-day torsos. The genius of the poem is in the way it laminates the unique and the general; the way it recognises that while being illuminated with immensity may feel like a miracle to a soldier who has lived through a night – or night after night – in the ...”

“... man’ had a sharp memory. Did he know Joan of Arc? ‘Know her? I went with her!’ And Robin Hood? ‘Lovely man. Ran around the forest. Took from everybody and kept it.’ Dietary secrets of long life? ‘Nectarines: a hell of a fruit. Not too cold, not too hot, you know. Just nice.’ Roy Walford, a gerontologist and immunologist in Los Angeles ...”

“... some nice bits of furniture but the atmosphere (well-heeled retired couples, women in sharp little Robin Hood hats, men in Barbours) puts me off, and having driven fifty miles to get there, I spend ten minutes looking round, then beat a quick retreat. I drive back over upper Wharfedale to Kettlewell on a road that used to be deserted and scarcely ...”