“... to Surrey: they might be found anywhere. The county’s richness has little to do with grandeur. Page after page records the sheer mass of the higher ordinariness, which is what makes Surrey extraordinary.This distension is largely due to a catholic inclusiveness, to O’Brien’s long hours in archives as well as sedulous ...”

“... has the spirit of his best non-fiction, that of the set-apart morning, with a ray shining on the page. It both demonstrates his greatest gift and represents the desire to have this part of him set alone from the rest. Experiment:​ use my brain damage to travel back to a time when we did not know this about him. The memory wipe I experienced after Covid in ...”

“... a previously unknown territory which he was to explore and conquer later.’ At the bottom of the page, in minute letters, as though intended to remain invisible, Andrew has set down Jocasta’s lines from King Oedipus: ‘Fear not thy mother’s marriage bed/For many a man has in his dream/Slept with his mother.’ The incestuous union was consummated some ...”

“... On its own it would be enough to class Johnston with Henry Reed, Bernard Spencer, F.T. Prince and Norman Cameron. It is a high-quality example of what can by now be seen to be a particular school of Virgilian plangency, the poetry of the broken-hearted fields. But it is probably not one of Johnston’s best things. It loses nothing by its air of doomed ...”

“... on topics such as Dryden’s triplets, Shakespeare and anagrams, T.S. Eliot, Henry James, Byron, Norman Mailer, Ion Bugan, Samuel Beckett, Geoffrey Hill, and what Ricks argues is the non-distinction between poetry and prose. ‘Any claim to coherence has to be a mild one,’ Ricks says of the volume, since the two subjects, heroism and the heroic line, are ...”

“... The Independent pursues its campaign against John Birt over his tax arrangements. On another page it boasts its acquisition of Jim Slater as its Stock Exchange commentator.13 March. To Weston to see Mam, who is dulleyed, expressionless, absent. The sun is hot through the blinds and the radio full on. ‘My,’ says a nurse (who’s not really a ...”

“... writers and more formidable strategists, but no better entertainer.Yet Sam Tanenhaus’s thousand-page biography of Buckley provoked discontent in right-wing reviewers (once they had given it a ‘Washington read’ and searched for their names in the index). Not all the facts of the life were convenient. What appeared to be a career on the permanent ...”

“... a statement he had made about the respective bids for Westland. The Sun ran the story on its front page in early January 1986 under the headline ‘You Liar!’ (‘Tarzan gets rocket from top law man’). Two days later Heseltine walked out of cabinet, declaring ‘there has been no collective responsibility in the discussion of these matters. There has been ...”

“... committee. The Roskill Committee found historical matters to be tedious, and meriting less than a page in their Report. They also found them to be a source of irrevelant passions: ‘Our task has been to look at this emotive topic dispassionately in the light of the evidence presented to us.’ Since history might be ‘emotive’, it could be excluded from ...”

“... not to this ethnic-political entity, the ‘New English’, but to the ‘Old English’, of Anglo-Norman descent like the family names of Burke, Nagle and Nugent, and historically Catholic. His family were converts to the Church of Ireland, much like the conversos or ‘New Christians’ of 16th-century Spain, who maintained in private the religion they were ...”

“... how many times Ireland had been invaded and attacked I was able to say that our family name was Norman and that we had invaded Ireland, and if we wanted to be Irish as well – and we certainly did, my uncle, after all, was a founding member of Fianna Fáil – we would have to accept the idea that we had invaded ourselves. Scoring a point like this seems a ...”

“... and the idea of a new look in the traditional way the words make their shape and impact on the page gives a lift to the poetry reader in the same way that ‘New Improved Formula’, printed on the wrapping, has its conditioned effect on the consumer. Sensible and low-keyed, the introduction to the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry recognises ...”

“... device, a point of view. She appends a small anthology of the poems, well translated by Peter Norman, that she deems necessary for an understanding of her narrative. Anatoly Nayman, a poet and playwright, was, along with Joseph Brodsky and Dmitry Bobyshev, one of a group of young writers whom Akhmatova made her spiritual children. He met her in 1959 and ...”

“... other musical forms.’ He goes on to argue for this with all the acumen and none of the irony of Norman Tebbit arguing for the aesthetic claims of page-three girls (Rubens painted naked women, too). Thus Lanza: ‘Judging from their literature, the Greeks were rarely without some kind of perpetual musical ...”

“... The projectionist told me personally.’ Boys’ Town was a 1938 Hollywood movie, directed by Norman Taurog and admired for Spencer Tracy’s performance as a priest who rehabilitates juvenile delinquents in a kind of camp, through what we might call ‘tough love’, but not a film that would normally be considered a masterpiece. I imagine it must have ...”