“... wheels of cheese, and the usual tributes of tobacco, guns and rum. By the time Naimbana fixed his mark to this document, more than a quarter of the settlers had died, probably of the falciparum malaria that continues to plague Sierra Leone’s population today. The new inhabitants of Granville Town – named for Sharp – would have been further disheartened ...”

“... at home. Dinner was one of James’s crunchy curries. He was not patient to husk, scrape, cleanse, peel, crush, chop, grind and sort: he threw each ingredient into the pot just as it had come out of the brown paper bag and he served it up, husks and pods and skins together, on rice that was mixed with fine gravels. For dessert Phyllis produced a thin chocolate ...”

“... his own longing for publication himself. The H.D. pastiche comes from a garbled version of John Peel’s radio programme Night Ride because Moore identifies so sharply with the unsigned acts that sent in their demos to the show (he himself sent Peel poems after discovering him on Radio One when the hospital radio would ...”

“... the Firth of Forth. From Kinghorn, the Fife coast and the coast of East Lothian appear to peel away from each other; on the horizon lies the North Sea. There are several islands out in the firth and, as usual, a number of ships were riding at anchor. The ships were connected to the oil industry: the Grangemouth refinery is a few miles upriver. How ...”

“... with her accession, it could take nothing for granted. It was less than a decade since Robert Peel had predicted that it would not last another five years, and while the violent civil disorder of the early 1830s had abated, there was still considerable ambivalence towards an institution whose incumbents in the two previous reigns had done much to ...”

“... was in his portrayal of Monica Jones – full name Margaret Monica Beale Jones – as Margaret Peel (in the manuscript Margaret Beale, but altered at Larkin’s insistence) as a neurotic, needy academic. Larkin’s relationship with Monica began in the summer of 1950, and would last until his death. Like that with his mother, it might be described as ...”

“... and Thackeray became journalists as well. Bored with running newspapers, G.W.M. Reynolds and Mark Lemon turned their hand to penny dreadfuls and comedies. The deregulation of the London stage in 1843 meant that actors, managers and playwrights competed for ever-growing theatrical audiences. And the great schism in the Scottish churches, the fall-out from ...”

“... agent: Half-ignorant, they turn’d an easy wheel, That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel. Many writers have suspected that the cradle of the Renaissance was also the cradle of modern capitalism or at least of materialism; hence the revulsion felt by Ruskin and Ezra Pound, for example, at much 16th-century Italian art. In the Introduction to his ...”

“... biggest gasworks in England. And I know the manager.’ A different order of aunt is Aunt Eveline Peel, my grandmother’s sister-in-law. Aunt Eveline is never Aunty Eveline. I suppose because she is older and too substantial for that. A pianist for the silent films, come the talkies she takes up housekeeping in Bradford, her employer a widower, a Mr ...”

“... few decades ago. The island’s trees were cut down for the salt works, and the land has dried up. Mark Kurlansky, who went there, describes meeting elderly salt veterans, Belongers, who recall that with wages of a shilling and sixpence a day for hard labour shifting salt sacks, and with no alternative employment, they might as well have been slaves. It’s ...”

“... to Paris, studied law perfunctorily and joined a group of young writers determined to make their mark. Dazzling no one but well-liked, he wore dashing white boots, ran through the money his mother left him and embarked on a scandalous affair with a married woman. In 1647, judging it was time he settled down, his father found him a wife, Marie Héricart. She ...”

“... that teachers would always skive if they saw a chance. His remedy was to keep them up to the mark by ‘hope and fear’, and the means of enforcing this felicific calculus was to pay schools for results ascertained by tests. The great engine of quality control currently clumping in clumsy pattens across all sectors of the British educational system is ...”

“... rhetoric for unsound doctrine. Anathemas are pronounced with quarrelsome tenderness. Rogue cadres peel away to check out the alternative festival, the real action, the underground’s underground. An insider would have a sharper take on this scene. The Leeds-based poet, who operates as ‘Out to Lunch’, with long experience of these binges behind ...”

“... a sense of betrayal keeping constant guard over their earnestness. The author of Saint Morrissey, Mark Simpson, is an über-admirer in this style, and it follows, quite naturally, that he is also a writer with disciples of his own, having been described in reviews of his previous books as a ‘beauhunk’, ‘the gay antichrist’, and ‘the male gay Camille ...”

“... of which was very Jewish in its focus. Most notable were the painters Solomon J. Solomon ... and Mark Gertler ... The sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein (1880–1959), born to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents in New York, came to Paris in 1902 and settled in London three years later.” What are we to understand by ‘very Jewish’? That many artists were Jewish? A ...”