“... spent years carefully tracking and tracing the continuities between Hardy and Larkin and Geoffrey Hill, say, and producing learned monographs on the Movement or on Ted Hughes suddenly took the notion to write a book about Frederic Prokosch (a poet, like Day Lewis, who made most of his money from novels), or Archibald MacLeish (again, like Day Lewis, a career ...”

“... meet their deadlines in the phased demilitarisation set out in Thaci’s undertaking. General Sir Michael Jackson, the KFOR commander, to whom the undertaking was given, has said in effect that full disarmament is a pipe-dream, but he’s confident that some sort of demilitarisation schedule will be completed and he’s prepared to stretch a date or two on ...”

“... report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach British values. In November, the DfE issued what it called ‘strengthened guidance’ on ‘promoting British values in schools’ – a necessary move, according to Lord Nash, the schools ...”

“... McCluskie remains in prison. It is customary to think of long sentences and long stretches as Michael Howard’s contribution to British penal policy, but he is merely the latest in a long, if occasionally interrupted, line of social conservatives with a particular interest in correction. When, in October 1993, he announced to the Conservative Party ...”

“... keep surgeries and hospices busy in the future. The Environment Agency fed the relevant minister, Michael Meacher, the usual soft soap. The firms responsible for working mixed ash into conglomerates used to surface new roads declined to reveal the locations of their handiwork, the 12,000 tonnes of aggregate dropped on the landscape. Their spokesman, sweating ...”

“... them. I buy the same ones every time – A4 and green as it happens – and the man in Haverstock Hill who sells them to me always looks up as if to say ‘here we go again.’ The hopefulness wears off and I grow superstitious and fearful looking at the pages. What if I can’t get it down? Looking at the last page I try to guess at some future frame of ...”

“... with our parents. It’s still there, in the cool brightness of the porch of their house on the hill in Broughty Ferry in the east of Dundee, with logs and potatoes and an old sideboard hand-decorated by my mother. The animal was killed by my great-uncle, Robin Meek, and a local huntsman, Belli, in the Nilgiri hills in southern India in 1931. Originally ...”

“... Cearna but found ‘the entire island’. They had moved into a part of Springfield called Hungry Hill, which became, at least for a generation, a kind of island itself. In 1974, Sean Cahillane, one of the next generation of the Blasket-Americans, stood for election to the Massachusetts state government. He was the youngest and poorest in the race. He won his ...”

“... is clear from contemporary newspaper comments: the whole episode was soundly ridiculed from Gold Hill, Nevada to Mariposa, California. Clemens left Nevada abruptly. For the next few years he was to eke out a precarious living as a reporter in San Francisco. On a visit in 1853 San Francisco had seemed an excitingly cosmopolitan bolt-hole from Virginia City ...”

“... Paul Lauter’s revisionist Heath Anthology of American Literature (1990) and Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner’s English Literatures of America (1996), but they do so in diametrically opposed ways. The new Norton turns outward to include a staggering array of post-colonial writers, from Chinua Achebe to Alice Munro to Les Murray. (None of the ten ...”

“... circuit – at Stockholm in 1960, where he had been introduced by the Cambridge Medieval historian Michael Postan, another Eastern European and the man who discovered Marc Bloch for English-speaking historians – ended in open conflict on the congress floor when the West Germans, led by Vittinghoff with Joseph Vogt in the background, made a ruthless attempt ...”

“... With the dread words ‘government’ and ‘regulation’ banned from the lexicon of the Hill, we have not entered an era of blissed-out libertarianism. Instead, lobbyists and fat cats are actually writing the legislation, rather than just pushing for it. The New York Times recently ran a front-page story its own reporter could hardly believe, about ...”

“... nothing new in England, but in 1958 the fury of white mobs over five days and nights in Notting Hill and Nottingham seriously alarmed the authorities. The Economist wrote that ‘the liberal line – uncontrolled immigration – can be held for a few more years, but not indefinitely.’ That same year the immigration figures from South Asia began to rise ...”

“... women’s huts were torched by a Langda war party. Many of the Una men who struggled slowly up the hill to fight them were killed. Their bodies were carried to Langda, five hours’ walk away and, she believed, eaten. ‘How does human flesh taste?’ I asked. ‘Like pig,’ Caleb interrupted. ‘It’s just meat,’ another villager added. The Una seemed to ...”

“... to be funny. I suppose otherwise they’d never laugh at all. In their biography The Real Romney, Michael Kranish and Scott Helman write that ‘within the family, Romney’s zany side was well known.’* They give two examples: Romney assuming ‘the voices of cartoon characters’ in letters home from Bordeaux, where he was a missionary in the late ...”