“... is never left unadorned by epithet: ‘the sour-stomached Thomas Carlyle’, ‘the flamboyant John Elliotson’, ‘the one-eyed, gold-waistcoated, civic-skewering Robert Knox’, ‘the humane mad-doctor John Conolly’, ‘the bombastic Ernst Haeckel’. If Desmond gave us time to think about it, one might wonder ...”

“... she wouldn’t be at all disturbed or shocked. The fundamental part of his appeal, as the critic John Barber observed, ‘was both to mirror and to indulge the middle-class fear of sex’. Rattigan’s own father – their relations form another subtext in most of the plays – was a famous roué who had been eased out of the Foreign Office for ...”

“... Part Two, and to escape arrest he fled to France, accompanied by the Wykehamist gentleman-lawyer John Frost, described by Hitchens as secretary of the London Corresponding Society. The LCS was a society of radical artisans, not a gentleman’s club, and its secretary was in fact the shoemaker Thomas Hardy. The trial proceeded in Paine’s absence, and ...”

“... space. The sources are astonishingly various, but some authorities recur: Browning, Tennyson and John Updike would probably rank highest here on any cucurbit-count. I shall not question the charm or the exhaustiveness of Norrman and Haarberg’s research – though some at least of their quotations have been wrongly transcribed. What I do now turn to ...”

“... Descent Edinburgh Turnhouse, November 2009 I There’s something of the sky in everything or so it seems tonight, lights swimming up from hill-farms in the Pentlands, close to snow between the dairy-yards and presbyteries that straggle out, in spokes of white and gold to stars and clouds beneath the eye of heaven; II and always it’s there, that soft attentiveness, not looking down, or watchful, more a bandwidth in the squalls of microwave to which some wisp of distance in the heart could tune itself and find, beyond itself, a wavelength it could take for now or never ...”

“... A Breakfast Radish Whatever we’re dealing with catches us in mid-reconsideration. It’s beautiful, my lord, just not made to be repeated, that’s all. Counterterrorists have already invaded parts of England and Spain. Your action dollar at work. Deception figures in quite a few precious things, although, as I say, it’s a small remnant of what others have achieved to avoid being singed ...”

“... A cloud blew up and like that: OK fun’s fun but we’ve got issues, to wait until tomorrow. At least that’s what I heard, a kind of rushing as of water over steep slabs. More ants to fry. I was placed on administrative leave, you had to be there, nevertheless it sucked, went back years. No one could find the original copy, there were bats in the belfry ...”

“... A Frost Fair That old cliché: it seemed that time had stopped; and people we thought we knew came quietly out of the cold to meet us. Some of us thought it had something to do with the sun, and some, with how the planets were aligned, but later, when the river froze for miles, we took our first crazed steps into an air we’d never breathed till then, our strange companions smiling, as we pitched our tents and stalls, happy to see the flags and bunting, as if yellow was a thing they’d never seen before – and red, and green – as if, for them, the world was always white: snow on their lips and hands and a shine in their eyes that made us think of children like ourselves watching a magic lantern in the dark and falling, through slide after slide, into understanding ...”

“... Like a wind-up denture in a joke store fate approaches, leans quietly. Let’s see … There was moreover meaning in the last clause, meaning we couldn’t equate from what was happening to us down the block. We approached with some hesitancy: Let ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would.’ Wasn’t it April? Weren’t things more likely to last in this or any season? Rhymes we like ...”

“... Whoso List to Hunt Small comfort to be had in mea culpa, damp afternoons, just shy of saccharin, a boyhood in the rain rescripted as a child’s compendium of minor sins. No subtlety of eyes around my bed; no whispered blame, no frost-fall in the blood, but later, when I lay me down to sleep and all the lamps burn out across the yards, I come home to the sadness of the creatures: our hunting fathers, drowned in no man’s land, love in the absence of Thou, the finer disciplines that winter recommends, such sanctuary I find, but cannot keep, since in a net I seek to hold the wind ...”

“... Last Sunday morning at six o’clock in the evening as I was sailing over the tops of the mountains in my little boat a crewcut stranger saluted me, so I asked him, could he tell me whether the little old woman was dead yet who was hanged last Saturday week for drowning herself in a shower of feathers? ‘Ask Monk Lewis what he thinks “been there done that” means in the so-called evening of life ...”

“... Not You Again Thought I’d write you this poem. Yes, I know you don’t need it. No, you don’t have to thank me for it. Just want to kind of get it off my chest and drop it in the peanut dust. You came at me and that was something. I was more than a match for you, you were a match for me, we undid the clasps in our shirtings, it was a semblance of all right ...”

“... to sit on so that at least I could force a smile’), Prescott and his bulimia. Cherie Blair and John Prescott may not have been the most unpopular figures of Blair’s government but they were the two who had the hardest time in the press. Both spent long stretches in the contemporary equivalent of the stocks; a scarring experience, and both of them were ...”

“... and his own diagnosis of Larkin’s virtues. Long ago, the Poet Laureate referred to him as ‘the John Clare of the building estates’, a decidedly quaint though no doubt a heartfelt compliment, in line with Eric Homberger’s later summing-up of Larkin as ‘the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket’, or the more magisterial pronouncement that his ...”

“... always turn parody into new reality and the Gothic into his own version of the electrically banal. John Jones may be right to write off The Idiot in his study and leave it out of discussion. Even its humour is disproportionate, and it is peculiarly difficult to separate in it the essential from the inessential, the blind alley (Myshkin) from the continuing ...”