“... taste.In a half-facetious account of social class in the United States in the early Reagan era, Paul Fussell – better known for his cultural histories of the First and Second World Wars – mapped yacht ownership onto position on the social ladder. ‘Because it’s the most expensive, yachting beats all other recreations as a theatre for upper-status ...”

“... material explanations for these fears, which are something close to a cultural universal. Paul Barber, in Vampires, Burial and Death (1988), argued that corpses do, under certain circumstances, behave in ways consistent with the legends. He consulted P.V. Glob’s 1965 study of the ‘bog people’ from Iron Age Scandinavia, whose bodies have been ...”

“... and is fond of dressing up in other people’s personalities. After the Almighty, after St Paul – for whom he confesses ‘a strange liking’ – his most influential model, or imaginative icon, is John Bunyan, whose life and work obsess him. Bunyan is ‘this dreamer and penman’, ‘the most prominent man of letters as far as English literature ...”

“... Eli Lilly trial site in Indianapolis. Britain had its own disaster at Northwick Park Hospital in north-west London, where six healthy subjects nearly died in a ‘first in man’ study of a monoclonal antibody. And Pfizer has spent longer than a decade dealing with the fallout of a study in Kano, Nigeria, in which 11 children died during a meningitis trial ...”

“... for the optical investigation of printed materials – something akin to the desk of shame in the North Library where degenerates and potential self-abusers are condemned to sit. We have seen the BL’s future – will it work? No, it won’t. Or, more precisely, if anyone thinks that using BL 2000 will involve no more than walking half a mile ...”

“... from the Franciscans at Gormanstown, his escape from university – first from Dublin, then from North London Polytechnic, and finally from Freiburg (where he befriended, for reasons soon to be illumined, a corps of medical students) – or any of the several other blessings this life bestows, could disabuse him of the sense, continuously a part of his ...”

“... of both hands together and touching the centre of their chest with them. You won’t see this north of the Alps. Surely there was no more homogeneity in Europe four or five centuries ago? Nor arc gestures permanent in one country – or in its art. Young British noblemen painted by Sargent, Lawrence and Reynolds, for instance, may resemble those painted ...”

“... discussion include Michael Bracewell, Dick Hebdige, Lynne Tillman, Kathy Acker, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Johnson, W.G. Sebald. The eateries and supermarkets of Aberdeen are visited, and rendered, as far as I can see, entirely accurately. (I come from Aberdeen, which is how I’d know.) Ditto the hills walked and the stone circles visited. Ditto the ...”

“... history. Kiberd is, in fact, a victim of Southern Irish post-colonial trauma (both sides in the North fiercely resist being defined etc by others). He says: ‘We lose if we uncritically accept the old racialist stereotypes. We lose if we critically reinterpret them, because we are still sanitising a slur. And yet we lose also – even to the point of ...”

“... to Northern youth. By the mid-Sixties Jamaican sound systems in South London, Birmingham and the North of England were playing the bluebeat and ska records that marked the ripening of reggae. In 1964, while rock ‘n’ roll, soul, rhythm and blues, and beat music were mutating into vying forms, and laying down roots in British cities, Brian Epstein had ...”

“... old millennial urge for a New Beginning still running strong. It is the promise of Prime Minister Paul Keating, of the Labour Party, of the Australian Republican Movement, as well as the majority wish of the population as sounded by pollsters, that on Australia Day 2000 – or at the latest by 1 January 2001, the anniversary of Federation – Australia will ...”

“... Poetry bubbles from peat bogs, People strain for the old folk’s fatal gobs Coughed up in grates North or North-East ’Tween bouts o’ livin dialect . . . Dabydeen’s tacit questions – about dialect, exclusion, preservation, authenticity and vogueishness – have been dealt with explicitly by other writers: Douglas ...”

“... of brown sea, dancing, like water in the window of a half-full kettle at boiling point.The great North Sea storm of 2013 came sixty years after the great North Sea storm of 1953. In Lincolnshire, nobody was killed, against 41 in 1953. Then, the storm was seen as one of those natural disasters that comes along every century ...”

“... improved text of a major poet in its amplified context. It is hard on Shelley, and doubly hard on Paul Foot, to turn to his book after the Byronic feast. Foot is modest about his own professional credentials – he charmingly quotes the equally charming observation of the Shelley scholar G.M. Matthews: ‘I do not think you err on the side of pedantry.’ The ...”

“... been reissued recently by Penguin, in hardback and with new introductions. It follows the hapless Paul Pennyfeather, who, expelled from Oxford for a misdemeanour he did not commit, wanders through an unsuccessful career as a schoolmaster before becoming engaged to the grand and wealthy Margot Beste-Chetwynde. As it happens, her riches derive principally from ...”