“... Verse, proprioception, Mayan glyphs, Alfred North Whitehead, a grab bag of poetic theorising. Six foot eight and wide of girth, he commanded a room. On one occasion in Berkeley, wind in his sails, he ranted on stage for more than four hours before Duncan walked out and the staff turned off the lights. Apparently Creeley would begin by making a statement or ...”

“... Paul Laurence Dunbar​ ’s poem ‘We Wear the Mask’ was published in 1895.We wear the mask that grins and lies,It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, –This debt we pay to human guile;With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,And mouth with myriad subtleties.Why should the world be over-wise,In counting all our tears and sighs?Nay, let them only see us, while        We wear the mask ...”

“... over the last quarter-century with little thanks to his ostensible political opponents. Michael Foot and his dog Dizzy can stand as a tableau testifying to the magnanimity (or credulity) with which the old magic is perpetuated among political romantics of all persuasions. No, what scotched the Disraelian legend as serious history was the standard biography ...”

“... altercations between Hu and Foucquet; finally, there is a minute examination of the nine-by-12-foot space in which Hu was to pass most of his stay in Europe. There is little in the way of commentary: the story is left to speak for itself, through the original words and Spence’s reconstructed images. Interpretation could easily have been laid on with a ...”

“... heroine, is of an Australian-Irish Catholic Labour family. Her villainous and unfaithful husband, Paul, is Polish-Australian scion of Kozinski Constructions (their 72 foot-motor yacht is called the Vistula), ‘big developers’, destroyers of the old Sydney, under investigation by the National Securities Commission. ...”

“... squeezing pimples or playing conkers: Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I’d disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmeralda, more or less on a whim. That’s my score to date. Three. I haven’t killed anybody for years, and don’t intend ...”

“... Osmond when he spun the coin in the centre circle, resembled a grimacing Magwitch by half-time. Paul Mariner, a picture of pampered, hammy self-love at club level, reminded me, as he trudged from the park, of the standard, traumatically chinless mod who puts in depressingly regular appearances at South Coast magistrates’ courts after Bank Holiday ...”

“... books followed each other in rapid succession last year: Chris Mullin’s on the Birmingham case, Paul Foot’s on the Bridgewater case and then Robert Kee’s* on the Guildford case. Kee’s is a drier, less passionate book than the other two, partly because its prose is more visibly marked by the size-12 footprints of the libel lawyer. Once again we ...”

“... of various ethnicities. There was Jovo, a Montenegrin with a huge black moustache. There was Paul, a Serb, who had been a partisan and had a long scar on his cheek. There was a Slovenian hunter who wore a Tyrolean jacket and played the accordion. My mother would rustle up something to eat, and everybody would sit around the Tilley lamp and talk – about ...”

“... received a physical deferment from the draft during the Vietnam War because of a problem with his foot, although he can no longer remember which foot. He was a football, squash and tennis player at the time.)African Americans Trump: ‘I have a great relationship with the blacks.’Muslim Americans Trump: ‘They’re ...”

“... family living in Holland Park. But the great turning point came in 1909, when she married Paul Landemare.Landemare was a French chef and a widower with six children. He came from a family of Parisian pâtissiers: the Landemares were listed in the Annuaire-almanach du commerce in the 1880s as suppliers of a range of sweetened ...”

“... are conducted within the text. The phobia about the Thames flooding through the Greenwich foot tunnel suffered by the wimpish Frances Peverell signals the obvious prompt to Dame Phyllis (obligingly picked up by John Walsh in the Independent magazine). The drag, for this reviewer, was being caught up in an unforgiving ‘Garlands of English ...”

“... Beppino to let them come aboard their boat. ‘For two months we lived without ever setting foot in an inn. We lived outdoors, with the people, and living the frugal life of the people. We became of the people ourselves, in order to be closer to nature. We dressed almost the same as they did.’ That ‘almost’ speaks worlds, as do the literary ...”

“... Whatever happened to Baby Jane? and John Fowles’s The Collector. A best-selling author, Paul Sheldon, crashes in a desolate area of the Rockies. It is winter, his car is buried in the snow, and his broken body is rescued by an eccentric recluse. She turns out to be a homicidal and crazy nurse, Annie Wilkes, who before retiring under something of a ...”

“... it seems they will kill him so as to deny the regime an asset. A 12-year-old girl with a wounded foot and an ulcerated mouth guards Mallory, armed with a rusty Lee Enfield that is to figure talismanically throughout the subsequent story. Mallory tries to escape, and the girl pulls the trigger. At this point it is plausible to assume an Incident-at-Owl-Creek ...”